NEWPORT has suffered from years of delay, inconvenience and danger from ill-conceived road plans.

That’s according to the Newport Civic Society, which has called for a new motorway to the south of the city.

Gwyn Kemp-Philp, the organisation’s transport officer, wrote to the Argus after an accident with a tanker forced the Southern Distributor Road to shut in July.

Mr Kemp-Philp said Newport’s roads had been “exposed for what they are.

Antiquated and inadequate!”

He said: “We have endured years of delay, inconvenience and danger from ill-conceived road planning and construction that intrudes into the daily lives of almost everyone in and around Newport on a daily basis.”

He said a now-closed Welsh Government consultation on measures to improve the M4 had been dealing with “problems that should have been addressed decades ago”.

He said that the only way to cure the “agony of Newport’s daily toil” was to decommission the existing M4 and the SDR and construct an “A48 standard ring-road” around Newport, with a new motorway passing to the south.

The new road would need “political will and some resolve and backbone to do something” before South-East Wales is left as “the backwater the rest of the country already thinks it is”.

“It’s not too expensive. It’s never been too expensive, but it will cost even more next year when we’ll need it twice as much,” he added.

A registered charity, Newport Civic Society’s website says it exists to promote and preserve the environment, buildings and architecture in the city of Newport. The Southern Distributor Road was shut on July 23 after an oil tanker overturned, spilling oil across the road and closing the carriageway in both directions for eight hours.