Traffic jams need solution (From South Wales Argus)

"When it takes ten minutes longer to get to work by car or bus than by walking, there is a problem."

Sorry to be captain obvious, but if it's quicker to walk to work then surely you just save the fuel and walk. Give your legs some exercise instead of your fingers.

Why do people think bus lanes create congestion? They don't. Its junction capacity that does. If you remove the bus lane along Clarence Place - traffic will still be queuing along the town bridge. The reason? The flow of traffic on the Old Green Roundabout.

Clarence place congestion

The daily debacle at Clarence Place is further exacerbated by the closure of the B4596 Caerleon Road slip road onto the M4/A4042 due to some engineering problem.

As a result all the traffic from Caerleon and the east of Newport that would normally use this as their preferred route to the city centre, the M4 and elsewhere are now adding to the existing daily traffic snarl up.

So to suggest that people walk or use the bus, for many is just not a viable option unless they have the time to use public transport and are able to do all the things that the car allows i.e. dropping the kids off at the school that choice allows parents to do (not the one that serves their area)

The normal daily problem in Clarence Place is cause by the central/WAG funded Bus Lane initiatives supposedly designed to make bus journeys much speedier through the centres of towns and cities, to the detriment of car owners, in the notion that by improving one aspect and making the other more fraught, people would opt to go by the former and ergo improve bus usage and reduce green house gases, that have made our weather so bad. (Where are all the doom and gloom merchants on this story now? As it no longer to feature in the news now)

However, unless you have cheap/free and frequent buses, that mirror the individuals travel destinations, along with making the overall journey length not significantly more, factoring the lack of adequate bus shelters etc etc, this is yet again another well meaning policy destined for the annals of government failures.

Because most people do not have a car solely for travelling back and forth to work, but for families, shopping, holidays, etc once you have a car, tax and insured it, even with record fuel costs, the convenience and cost of fuel out weights the walking to the bus stop and waiting in the rain for the pleasure of siting on a bus crammed with CHAVs and the likelihood that the journey cannot be made via one bus trip.

May be the council should emporarily suspend the bus lane, which isn't compliant with the law as it lacks the 'End of Bus Lane' sign