Island Roads has announced that the fault with the main set of traffic lights on the Link Road junction with the dual carriageway (Medina Way) in Newport has been fixed and the Link Road is now open.
Motorists were stuck in miles of queues throughout the day today due to the Link Road spanning between Fairlee Road and Medina Way being closed in one direction. This was put in place for safety reasons due to the permanent lights not working following a fault last night.
Some readers were reporting being stuck in traffic for of 2-and-a-half hours between Ryde and Newport – delays which have continued throughout the day.
Those involved in the delays included school buses which meant school children were not arriving at school until mid-morning.
A specialist mainland team with the necessary replacement parts were called to the Island and it was intended to have the lights repaired overnight ready for the Friday morning rush hour. Thankfully, the works have been completed earlier than planned.
Hundreds of workers were late to work and have expressed their fury over social media all day, with several suggesting putting temporary traffic lights in situ for the duration of the outage.
The Isle of Wight Council said that this was not possible as the lights at this location are synchronised with those on the entire Coppins Bridge gyratory system so it is not possible to quickly introduce temporary lights without further adversely affecting all routes in and out of Newport.
Island Roads and the Isle of Wight Council have apologised for the inconvenience caused.
I must be in a time warp, I thought this evening was still Thursday?
a tweet
“The Fairlee traffic lights have now been fixed. Thanks for bearing with us and sorry for any inconvenience. @iwight”
That is island roads idea of an apology for costing the community many tens of thousands of pounds in lost productivity etc.
They should have specified and installed a robust traffic management system in the first place, with local support and maintenance to avoid a fault causing such a problem.
They should not be reliant on mainland repair organisations.
How many hours did it take to resume proper service? 18hours or more, I’ve heard. Totally inexcusable.
How much did this incident cost the Community? Far too much.
Shame I was 3 hours late for work today was great
An apology. This is appalling. You only need to turn the other lights off . People can use their common sense.
So for a 50 metre stretch of road and one set of traffic lights the majority of the Island was brought to a stand still – kind of weird 🙂
“so it is not possible to quickly introduce temporary lights without further adversely affecting all routes in and out of Newport”
I BEG TO DIFFER & and think that it should have been TRIED!
Whats the worse that could have happened? Perhaps some imporvement over yesterdays mess.
Even if it had to be manually operated rather than timed traffic lights I’m sure that a human could have avoided “affecting all routes”
BUY A HELCOPTER AVOIDS LOTS OF DELAYS MAKE SURE YOU TOP UP OTHERWISE COULD BE BIT OF A QUICK DROP OFF