NEWPORT faces years of traffic woe - more road repairs, a major motorway junction change, and the city centre redevelopment scheme are set to drive motorists to despair.

The £50m Southern Distributor Road should be fully open next May or June - but in the autumn another major scheme is planned: remodelling the M4 junction at Tredegar Park, at a cost of £15m.

And the planned £100m transformation of the city centre - set to take around three years - will also cause delays, for part of the plan includes the realignment and widening of Usk Way and moving the bus station.

But the man blamed by many for the city's traffic hell says the answer partly lies with motorists.

Councillor Graham Dally, cabinet member for transport and sustainable development, has come in for fierce criticism from commuters and some businesses over the gridlock.

But yesterday he told the Argus thoughtless motorists who opted for their car over buses - despite improvements to public transport - were helping clog the roads.

"We want people to be able to get out of their cars and on to public transport," he said. "If you look at the commuter traffic, each car usually has just one person in it.

"We are not looking at congestion charges in Newport - although that is not to say the urban regeneration company will not come up with something like that."

He added: "We have to live with the pain until we get the SDR up and running - there is no short-term solution. It will reduce traffic in the city centre, but right now people are trying to get away from the major works and it is creating rat runs in the city."

One of the most controversial changes is the traffic-lights on Cardiff Road.

The lights replaced the roundabout last month and caused huge queues - not just on Cardiff Road, but on the previously jam-free Belle Vue Lane and Mendelgief Road.

Councillor Dally said: "The roundabout is gone for good - it will not be coming back."

The 'smart' lights have in-built technology to assess queues and alter their settings - but furious motorists blasted the system in the Argus' letters pages.

Now the council's engineers have made more adjustments, and a camera is being installed to monitor queues at these lights, and also at the Old Green crossing, by the castle.

"We will be able to physically view what is happening - it's something we should have thought of at the time, but now we will be able to see if there are problems," Councillor Dally said.

Highway chiefs agreed the lights added to motorists' journey times, but argued that the Cardiff Road traffic chaos was made worse by the Royal Gwent Hospital's roadworks. "The traffic-lights did add to journey times for the first few weeks," said Brian Kemp, head of engineering and construction with Newport council.

"It seemed that we started up the lights at the same time as the Royal Gwent's roadworks started - the trust had planning permission but they didn't tell us when they were going to start and we had no idea that was going to happen."

On May 8 we revealed that police, fire and ambulance crews were getting trapped in congestion on Cardiff Road - particularly around the Pont Ebbw roundabout, where the SDR works are under way. The council countered that emergency services could use bus lanes - but yesterday accepted some queues stretched back to areas without 'green roads'.

Councillor Dally said his team would be happy to meet emergency services to discuss the issue.

But he warned there was no quick solution.

"We have been underfunded for so many years that we are only now starting to get things rolling.

"We get £2m a year for maintenance of our roads. The last time we looked at how much it would cost to repair the roads to the standard we wanted it was £18m. It just can't happen."

* Pictured, queues form on Cardiff Road heading towards the new traffic lights system at the Belle Vue Lane junction