It is afternoon rush hour on the M4 and drivers are yet again making slow progress around the city of Newport, often seen as the gateway to south Wales given its location between Cardiff and Bristol.

Cars and lorries are stuck in gridlocked traffic in both directions on the approach to the Brynglas tunnels, where the road narrows to two lanes in each direction, while flashing lights warn motorists in Welsh and English of a ciw (queue).

Traffic jams may be an everyday reality for commuters and businesses trying to move goods around, but they have also become a hotly debated topic before the Senedd elections on 7 May, in a vote predicted to bring sweeping political change to the principality, and send Labour into opposition for the first time since devolution in 1999.

Congestion on this part of the M4 – the main route linking south Wales with England – has been complained about by businesses and commuters for decades, while a relief road around Newport has been proposed for almost as long. Motorists say tailbacks cost time and money, and make the country less attractive to potential investors.

Poor public services, and frustration over long waiting times for NHS treatment, rank top of the concerns for Welsh voters before the election, along with disappointment with transport services and infrastructure like roads, rail and buses.

“If there is an accident on the motorway, the whole of Newport is gridlocked,” says Rosemary, 81, waiting at the city’s bus station. “We could have done with that new relief road, it would have been a big help.”

The retired shop worker is dependent on buses to visit the shops and her daughter in a nearby town. “It’s not a very reliable bus service, it’s become really poor since the pandemic,” she says.

The six main political parties are split over how to tackle the tailbacks, and the issue prompted fiery exchanges during a leaders’ debate.

Two people in the running to become the next first minister, the leader of Plaid Cymru, Rhun ap Iorwerth, and Reform UK Wales leader, Dan Thomas, both support a new road, along with the Conservatives. Meanwhile, Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats have declared themselves against.

After years of political indecision, soaring costs and opposition from environmental groups, the relief road project was finally scrapped by the Labour-led Welsh government in 2019, citing the projected £1.4bn cost, and the adverse impact on its planned location on the Gwent Levels nature reserve.

Opposition parties have criticised Labour for the £114m spend on the project before cancellation, although the party has pledged to improve public transport, cap adult bus fares and expand the “South Wales metro” rail electrification project. The network of tram-trains, able to run on rail and tram lines, is over budget, but scheduled to enter service shortly.

On a bright spring day, the sun glints off the river Usk that flows through Newport before reaching the Severn estuary and spanned by the transporter bridge, symbolising the city’s industrial heritage when huge quantities of Welsh coal and steel were loaded on to ships at its docks.

“The No 1 issue for my members is the M4, the congestion and uncertainty,” says Josh Fenton, senior policy manager at industry body Logistics UK. “The longer HGVs are sat in traffic, that’s adding to cost, making things more difficult, and potentially putting some businesses off setting up locally.”

Any new road would cost considerably more than the £1.4bn previously estimated, after recent construction cost increases and inflation.

The cost could be “potentially even up to £2.5bn and the Welsh government’s capital budget is about £3bn,” says David Philips, head of devolved and local government finance at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

“Even if they were to do this over two terms, you’re looking at some £300m a year, which is 10% of the Welsh government’s capital budget. Then there’s lots of ambition for other things, like social housing, railways and investment in school and health facilities,” adds Philips.

The two parties topping the polls, Plaid and Reform, agree on the need for a new road, yet hold differing views on how to pay. At the Newport launch of Reform’s manifesto for the Senedd elections, party leader Nigel Farage said he would build a “toll road”, while Plaid have not laid out how they would fund the scheme.

“It comes with some kind of cost,” says Philips. “Either you need to borrow in an expensive way, or you need to cut back some other areas, or you need to raise additional revenue.”

Putting 1p on all rates of income tax across Wales could raise £400m a year, Philips calculates, although he notes “you could say this is for an investment in transport, but people in north Wales wouldn’t be very happy about that”.

Plaid and Reform also offer vastly differing visions for the Welsh economy: Reform has previously proposed reviving Wales’ industrial past, including coal mining and steel making, while Plaid has promised to increase public procurement from Welsh businesses and create a new national development agency.

Whoever runs the next government in Cardiff will face a “Welsh budget under significant pressure”, according to the IFS, amid a slowdown in increases in UK government funding, and a growing demand for health and social care, prompting the thinktank to call on the main parties to be “more upfront about fiscal reality”.

Back in the 1970s, when Wales began to lose mining and heavy industry, it had some success in attracting foreign investment, partly thanks to transport links offered by the M4. However, much of this investment proved temporary, and many large multinationals have come and gone in the intervening years, including carmaker Ford, which closed its Bridgend engine plant in 2020, as well as South Korea’s LG and white goods manufacturer, Hotpoint.

Transport infrastructure could now deter other overseas investors from setting up in Wales, according to Gareth Jenkins, executive chair of manufacturer FSG Tool and Die, located a quick – or sometimes slow – 20 miles up the road from Newport in Llantrisant, which is also home to the Royal Mint, producer of the UK’s coins.

FSG employs about 100 people, mostly specialist engineers who make the tools that allow Starbucks to produce reusable cups, McDonald’s to make plastic sauce pots, and Tesla to make battery cases for its electric vehicles, for customers as far afield as the US and Bolivia.

Roads are “generally a nightmare”, says Jenkins. “I can’t prove it’s affecting inward investment, but, if I was an investor, I’d be thinking: ‘Can I get a good building cheaply? Where can I get my people from? Can I move my stuff?’” says the plain-speaking Welshman, who previously advised the Welsh government on the manufacturing sector after the financial crisis.

Manufacturing still accounts for about a sixth of Wales’s economic output, the highest share in the UK relative to the economy’s size, according to industry body, MakeUK. The sector employs 138,000 people in Wales, vital for a country with lower employment and higher economic inactivity than any other UK nation or region apart from Northern Ireland.

“For manufacturing in Wales, there’s two routes out, one in the north, one in the south. It’s not acceptable to say ‘We’ve got what we’ve got and we’re not going to spend any more money on the M4.’ You’ve got to move goods around and it isn’t going to go from Cardiff airport and is very unlikely to go from Port Talbot docks.”

The Welsh government recently won a case over its £205m decade-long subsidy package for state-owned Cardiff airport, brought by its rival in Bristol. Companies such as FSG are calling for an expansion in the airport’s cargo operations beyond several weekly freight flights to China, launched in 2024.

Public services and transport are the main concerns for Cheryl Tucker, and former colleagues Lisa Owen and Karen Jones, enjoying a coffee and a catch-up at a cafe around the corner from FSG.

Top priority would be more hospitals and improved medical care, Tucker says, adding “but you need a good road network to get to hospital or other places”.

Despite these frustrations, their disenchantment with politics means Tucker and her friends are not planning to vote in the Senedd election.

The rumbling noise in the night, still enough to waken the unhabituated, is what really goads some people living in Winslow, Buckinghamshire. Freight trains running through the new station since late 2024 prove this stretch of railway is operational. But the long-promised passenger services have yet to appear – and there is no sign of any arriving soon.

Welcome to East West Rail, open or not. For well over a decade, ministers have talked up a new railway linking Oxford to Cambridge via Milton Keynes to accelerate the drive for housing, jobs and growth – an arc of tech industry hailed as the UK’s answer to Silicon Valley.

With the first phase from Oxford to Milton Keynes built, it was highlighted again by the chancellor in January 2025: Rachel Reeves, laying out her economic vision, cited it as the “transport link needed to make the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor a success”. She looked forward to the start of passenger trains in the coming months, with Chiltern Railways officially taking over in March 2025.

Instead, with little or no explanation, the services failed to run, and the planned start date was shunted to autumn and then the end of 2025. Today, no target for opening is offered at all.

The extraordinary delay has left local MPs and would-be passengers ever more frustrated – not least those living in the new-build homes next to Winslow station, sold on the promise of commuter services via Milton Keynes or Oxford to London.

Callum Anderson, the MP for Buckingham and Bletchley, has been pushing for an answer from his Labour colleagues and campaigning for the line. “It’s unfortunate,” he said. “People can see it and hear it but they can’t use it.” It was, though, “important not to speculate or lay blame at any one door”.

But in the absence of convincing explanations, many people do. A dispute with unions over whether the two-carriage trains require guards is widely believed to be the crucial stumbling block, though the Department for Transport (DfT) and the RMT union deny it is the main reason. Chiltern had planned to start running trains with only a driver, opposed in principle by the RMT and Aslef, the drivers’ union. Many driver-only operations already exist.

A letter from Peter Hendy, the rail minister, to Anderson in March said the primary reason services had not started was that negotiations over contracts with Chiltern were “interrupted by the unexpected general election of July 2024”.

Hendy said trains would need to have been modified and driver training completed, and the new station at Winslow “fully handed over”, but added that “future staffing arrangements also remain to be agreed”.

In a recent statement to the House of Commons, Heidi Alexander, the transport secretary, said Chiltern was “pursuing rolling stock modifications, the completion of the intermediate station, and staffing and training for service introduction”.

The partial explanations, whispers and refusals to give adequate explanations have infuriated those seeking answers.

Diana Blamires is an independent councillor in Winslow, where 4,500 people remain stuck, trainless, halfway between Oxford and Milton Keynes. She has organised petitions and a protest last weekend at Bletchley station, and describes the DfT’s reasoning as “nonsense, pathetic, laughable … How come they could set up a freight train service?”

She said people were angered by the lack of progress. “There’s fury,” she said. “People came to places like Winslow thinking they’d be able to get a train to a job in London, or Milton Keynes or Oxford, or even Bicester. Young people wanted to work at Bicester Village. Now it’s two buses in the morning to get there.

“Rush-hour traffic to Oxford is terrible and it’s extremely expensive to park. People want to get the train and open it up as a place to work. It’s disrupted people’s lives – people move here for jobs and now they are really struggling to get to that job.”

Olly Glover, the Liberal Democrat transport spokesperson and MP for Didcot and Wantage, said any problems with the station were a “red herring” and the election was a “ridiculous” excuse, with the RMT dispute the only possible issue.

“Ultimately the government and the DfT are the ones who made the decision late, they have not resolved this impasse and they have no plan to do so,” Glover said. “They clearly have no plan – and not enough people are holding them to account.

“How are we going to deliver the Oxford-Cambridge growth corridor and all the housing and science facilities, if we have this brand new shiny railway and it’s not open for passengers after a year?”

Compared with, say, the travails and cost overruns of HS2, the story so far of East West Rail is a minor hiccup. But the failure to open even a short and far from ambitious railway – unelectrified and largely running on reclaimed or existing lines – has anguished observers.

The multiple players make accountability more slippery. At the outset is East West Railway Ltd, a private company set up by Chris Grayling, a former transport secretary, 10 years ago so the line could “happen quicker”. The company says it handed the line and station over completed for Network Rail’s sign-off in 2024. “We absolutely understand the frustration that local people in Winslow feel about the delay,” said Natalie Wheble, its external affairs director.

Chiltern Railways has cited unspecified problems with the station. One, according to the RMT, was that an emergency exit backed on to private land – an issue that is understood to have been resolved.

A Network Rail spokesperson said: “We have completed construction works at Winslow station and we are working to support Chiltern as they prepare to operate train services and manage the station.”

A Chiltern Railways spokesperson said it had made “significant progress” and the station was “now in the testing and commissioning phase”, but there was “work still to finish to prepare the trains, on Winslow station and on the operating arrangements for the new route”. They said Chiltern would “provide further updates when we are able to”.

The DfT would only say: “We are supporting Chiltern Railways as they work with unions and other industry partners to get these services up and running as soon as possible. The East West Rail project will unlock thousands of jobs and homes and kickstart hundreds of thousands of pounds of economic growth across England, but we need services to be allowed to start before we can start seeing those benefits.”

Clarification on whom the DfT – which dictated Chiltern’s contract and will soon nationalise its operation – is waiting on for “services to be allowed to start” has yet to be given.

An RMT spokesperson said: “It is simply inaccurate to blame delays to East West Rail on our dispute when the project has been held back for years by indecision, rising costs and unresolved planning issues. The industrial dispute only affects one part of the route and the biggest delays sit squarely with those in charge of managing the project.”

They said the union was opposed to driver-only operation “because it is vital there is a second safety-critical person onboard”, adding that RMT members would “not accept being used as cover for failures in project management”.

The longer story of the Oxford-Cambridge line stretches further into the distance, with yet more consultations ahead for the second and third phases. The development of the Universal Studios theme park in Bedford will bring more passengers – potentially resulting in bigger trains, longer platforms and perhaps another station but delaying construction. The route that finally hits Cambridge is yet to be nailed down, although the latest proposals from East West Rail Ltd are to hasten the building of a station at Tempsford where it crosses the east coast main line, ready for the planned new town.

Hendy’s letter suggested the creation of Great British Railways, including the nationalisation of Chiltern, would “make the process of implementing change on the passenger rail network much simpler in future”. If it does indeed take the advent of GBR to see the government force the line into action, as some locals fear, the wait for a train in Winslow could last some time yet.

Drivers have been told to expect the UK’s busiest May bank holiday traffic in years, despite high fuel prices and the looming end of the sunny spell threatening to dampen the long weekend.

More than 19m leisure trips by car were expected over the long weekend from Friday to Monday, according to research by the RAC motoring organisation – the most since 2016. Engineering works are also likely to disrupt rail journeys this weekend.

Almost 40% of drivers surveyed were planning an overnight break or day trip, with only 6% saying they were deterred by the surge in pump prices since the start of the hostilities in the Middle East.

Friday will see early getaways meeting commuter traffic and school runs, although the RAC has pinpointed late Saturday morning as the peak time for cars on the roads.

It highlighted the M5 from Bristol to Taunton as a likely congestion black spot as drivers head to Devon and Cornwall – although the traditional bank holiday change in weather to heavy rain, after a week of sunshine over much of the UK, could now see many plans change.

Meanwhile, engineering works on the railway will mean longer journeys and replacement buses for passengers around the country, including on the mainline from London to Edinburgh, as well as Liverpool and Bath.

Network Rail said the “vast majority” of Britain’s railway network will be open as usual but with “some notable exceptions” for works.

The east coast mainline will be shut between York and Darlington for three days from Saturday, adding hours to journeys between the capital and Edinburgh or Newcastle.

Works on the line running out of London Euston will mean slightly fewer and slower services to cities in the Midlands and the north over the weekend.

Liverpool’s Lime Street station will be closed all day on Sunday and until noon on Monday.

London’s Charing Cross and Waterloo East stations will also be closed for the same period.

Work around Bath Spa, Huddersfield and Ely will also disrupt journeys.

Anit Chandarana, a group director for Network Rail, said: “There is no right way to do major work on our railway, but bank holidays are still among the least busy times for us in terms of passenger numbers and freight services.

“I’d advise everyone to plan ahead and check before they travel.”