Council furious with developers who caused traffic misery in Aylesbury

A rogue set of temporary traffic lights has ground aylesbury to a stop this week

One temporary traffic light by the Holiday Inn ground Aylesbury to a standstill earlier this week.

The traffic lights on the A41 led to a deluge of people from Aylesbury getting in touch by the havoc caused on our roads.

Transport for Bucks talked about being snowed under with 'endless tweets', and had to issue a warning to drivers because of the amount of videos being sent in to staff from drivers sat in traffic.

After Aylesbury ground to a halt on Tuesday morning because of the lights, which were installed by Buckinghamshire County Council beause of 'development management works', works not works installed by Transport for Buckinghamshire.

It was later discovered the work had been undertaken by Taylor Wimpey and MV Kelly.

Drivers reported a backlog of traffic in Bedgrove, while queues extended past Arla on the A41, and motorists travelling the otherway were queued all the way back to Tring Road, which in turn caused congestion at people travelling through town.

After the carnage caused by the automated lights on Tuesday, the lights are now being manually controlled to manage the situation better.

Buckinghamshire County Council’s Deputy Leader and Transport Cabinet Member, Mark Shaw said that he completely understood the frustration for drivers and he wanted to assure motorists that the County Council was doing everything it could to help Taylor Wimpey and their contractor sort the situation out.

Aylesbury's traffic map on Tuesday morning at rush hour

Mark explained: “The developer’s contractor was excavating where all the electrics for the existing crossing are located, which meant that the permanent lights had to be turned off and replaced with the temporary set.

"Unfortunately, the contractor took this decision themselves and what has been done now cannot easily be undone.

"We are not happy about this approach and will need subsequent discussions with the developer so this type of situation doesn’t happen again.

“It’s clear that the temporary set of signals has not worked very well, so we have given the contractor details of some intelligent temporary signals that can be used to more closely replicate the situation provided by the original set. These will be installed as soon as possible.

“I’d like to apologise on behalf of the developer and their contractor for what’s happened. Can I reassure everyone that the County Council is doing everything it can to get this resolved and get traffic moving again.”

Last February, the BBC reported that Aylesbury is the 6th worse city in the UK for time spent in traffic, where drivers lost 35 hours a year sat in rush hour traffic. It was only narrowly beaten by Birmingham for time lost.

And it appears that nobody was immune to being sat in the long queues, even radio personality Andy Collins.

Andy said: " How the hell are developers getting away with this ???

"Why oh why are the council letting the developers do what they want without checking or at least without being supervised

"Seriously Aylesbury council need to grow a pair I'm sure they would be all over you and I if we did something on the building planning front without permission."