A hospital doctor has launched a petition to get the car share lane on the city's ring road scrapped.

Nigel Lane claims the car share lane – officially called a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lane – on the A4174, which bans drivers without passengers at busy times of the day, causes more traffic problems than it solves.

He said there had been mornings when it had added between 45 minutes to an hour to his journey to work from Barrs Court.

Now Dr Lane, 30, has taken his campaign to the Government and started a petition on the Number 10 website. He has also set up a page on social networking site Facebook.

The lane was originally introduced in 1998 between Bromley Heath and Hambrook as a way of encouraging car sharing. At the time it was only the second of its kind in the country.

But its arrival led to complaints that it penalised those who could not share cars and encouraged drivers to use rat runs in order to avoid the ring road.

Although it has now been in place for such a long time, use has levelled off in recent years, despite efforts to promote car sharing. A review showed it was used by about one in three of all vehicles and of those, a quarter were not meant to be there.

An experimental extension to the lane, added in 2004 from the Church Lane bridge to the Wick Wick roundabout, was met with opposition and was removed last year.

At the time, South Gloucestershire Council said the original length of HOV lane would remain as it would risk losing Government funding for road improvement schemes if it were removed altogether. But Dr Lane is pressing for the whole HOV lane to be taken away.

He said: "The lane causes so much trouble and at peak hours the traffic is absolutely horrendous.

"I work shifts and at weekends and on days when I'm not travelling at peak times, the journey is so much quicker.

"But often I'm on the ring road between 7am and 7.30am and it's very frustrating to be sitting there not moving when the other lane could be in use.

"The lane appears to me to slow the traffic down and cause more problems than it solves. I believe it should be finally scrapped."

So far 18 people have added their names to the petition.

South Gloucestershire Council spokesman Ryan Skeets said: "Following a review, the council is progressing plans to alter the current two-plus lanes to become priority vehicle lanes, as well as reducing their hours of operation. This will enable a greater number of vehicles to use them, which will benefit the users of general traffic lanes.

"We are currently waiting to hear back from the Department of Transport regarding the approval of these plans."