KINGSKERSWELL Alliance has costed its alternatives to the South Devon Link Road at £50m, less than half the estimated £130m price tag for the new road.
Alliance chairman Ken Pegden said that the congestion-reducing measures would deliver improved access to Torbay without devastating their village.
'The Alliance has always said it is in favour of sustainable alternatives rather than that we are against the bypass,' he said.
The document has been prepared by leading transport consultants Steer Davies Gleave and sent to the Department for Transport, local MPs and councillors, in an attempt to demonstrate that the alternatives are serious, thought-through and would work.
The proposed route of the bypass would clip the village and pass through Kerswell Down, an area of rich biodiversity.
Instead, the Alliance suggests a package of measures, such as reducing car use, better public transport and alterations to the A380 to improve traffic flows.
Devon County Council's own Local Transport Plan talks of the need to reduce car use and to switch to more sustainable transport modes, through car sharing, alternatives to the 'school run' and improving information on public transport alternatives. Good results, the Alliance says, could be achieved for £1.5m.
Public transport should should be improved with more services, bus lanes, park-and-ride schemes, higher quality vehicles and better connections to the places people need to reach such as shops, hospitals and offices. The Alliance says that the positive impacts of such a policy would be felt far beyond Kingskerswell and could be delivered for £5m.
Reopening Kingskerswell railway station, at an estimated £10m, would also significantly relieve congestion, offering journey times to Newton Abbot and Torquay of around four minutes.
Finally engineering alterations, including tunnelling beneath Penn Inn roundabout would reduce remaining flows on the A380. For £25m a tunnel could be built beneath one of the worst traffic hotspots, allowing traffic to flow unhindered between Exeter and Torquay.
Other engineering fixes might include a third lane that can switch direction at different times of the day. The system would be controlled using dynamic traffic markings embedded into the road surface. This technology, using light emitting diodes, is already in use in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and Spain and is currently being trialled in the UK. The Alliance says it could be installed for £7m.
Other proposed measures include a pedestrian underpass at Jury's Corner on the A380, near Kingkerswell primary school, and a roundabout at Kerswell Gardens, costing in total £3.5m.
These costings will supplement the 67-page document the Alliance submitted to the Department for Transport in response to Devon County Council's bid for the new road at the end of last year.
Mr Pegden said that it was only lack of cash which was preventing them from having more work carried out on the alternatives. So far their campaign has cost upwards of £10,000 raised from individual donations.
He said that the Alliance was involved in a David and Goliath struggle.
'Devon County Council has taken five years to produce their bid at a cost of many hundreds of thousands of pounds. We have to fund every little thing we do ourselves.'