PROBLEMS surrounding the £600,000 scheme to replace the 30-year-old traffic lights on the A39 at Dunster Steep further increased on Saturday (March 14) when the temporary lights system failed, causing five-mile tailbacks and what angry motorists described as ‘hours of absolute chaos’.

In the past weeks, more than 100 drivers have taken to social media to claim gridlock from Minehead to Carhampton, and frequently to Bilbrook and Washford, is often a daily occurrence and there was no sign of improvement with the Easter holidays approaching.

Delivery driver John Frost said: “Things are definitely getting worse and last Saturday was the final straw.

“It took me half-an-hour to get from Carhampton to Dunster.

“All the temporary lights were off and one man was standing in the middle of the road trying to sort out the chaos.”

Another motorist said: “The present system just is not working.

“Surely, it is time the council and their contractors had a rethink?”

But, in a statement to councillors, Somerset executive Cllr Richard Wilkins said while he ‘recognised the strength of local feeling about the road works, the configuration in place represents the safest and most practicable option to allow the work to proceed while maintaining traffic flow’.

Cllr Wilkins said: “No further intervention is available to speed up the programme.”

However, in the latest campaign against the controversial project, an independent traffic monitoring group claimed the work could be done at a fraction of the cost and without the need to dig up the A39.

A Freedom of Information (FoI) question by Mineheadtraffic.co.uk asked Somerset Council if its design team had considered using the existing A39 pedestrian underpass, which the council owns, as a ready-made cable route in order to replace the signals without excavating the carriageway.

A spokesperson for the traffic site, which monitors the daily Dunster hold-ups for about 800 browsers, said: “It is hard to see how a subway routing approach would not have been significantly cheaper and quicker than the current arrangement.

“Somerset Council’s FoI response confirms that no options appraisal, no feasibility study, and no cost comparison was ever produced before committing to open-cut excavation across the whole junction.

“The scheme has involved extensive carriageway excavations and prolonged traffic disruption.”

Council public liaison officer Syed Shah said: “I will ensure your query is noted and passed to the project team for awareness.

“It would not be appropriate for me to comment on technical design matters and I hope you will appreciate the design team have done what they needed to do.

“It is now the focus of our team to concentrate their time and effort on completing the task in hand.”

The traffic site spokesperson said: “The picture is that the council cannot explain why the Dunster Steep project needs four months to complete, will not answer FoI requests asking them to justify it, and does not want to receive structured evidence of the impact it is having on residents.”