The benefits that will be felt by Lancashire’s economy - and its commuters - make the £207m spent on the Preston Western Distributor Road a worthwhile investment.
That was the claim from senior councillors and the government after the route - the biggest road-building project in the county for 25 years - finally opened to traffic on Monday morning.
The two-and-a-half mile dual carriageway - and two, shorter, adjoining link roads - carried their first vehicles after a rain-soaked opening ceremony. The moment marked the culmination of almost four years of construction work on site and the best part of a decade of painstaking design.
The road - officially named Edith Rigby Way after the famous Preston suffragette - connects the A583 at Riversway and Blackpool Road to a new junction 2 on the M55 at Bartle.
It is designed to facilitate the near-6,000 new homes being built in the North West Preston area over the 20 years through to the mid 2030s.
However, the dignitaries that witnessed the cutting of the sodden ceremonial ribbon were keen to stress the wider boost that the roads would give to the county as a whole - as well as the need for Preston to grow in order to thrive.
Independent studies have suggested that there will be £60m of immediate benefits from the new infrastructure, plus £22m of “gross value added” to the Lancashireeconomy every year for the next 60 years.
Lancashire County Council leader Phillippa Williamson - whose authority spearheaded the scheme - said it had been “significantly challenging”, but that contractors Costain and County Hall’s own designers had been “ingenious” in how they had gone about delivering a project that includes two viaducts, two bridges and three underpasses.
“Some people say this is only going to impact people in Preston, [but] that’s just not true. It will obviously benefit people locally ..but the opportunities that it opens up for economic development and for housing across the county are considerable.
“[It’s] going to unlock huge areas of Preston in terms of housing development…as well as reducing strain on the [road] network.
“The team have done a fantastic job in terms of delivering it on time and on budget,” County Cllr Williamson added.
That budget ballooned from an estimated £104m when the scheme was first conceived to the £207m which it was forecast to cost by the time work started in autumn 2019 - an ultimately accurate prediction of the final bill.
The £434m Preston, South Ribble and Lancashire City Deal - a government-backed agreement to deliver 20,000 new jobs and over 17,000 new homes in the area - stumped up much of the Preston Western Distributor’s eventual cost via its Infrastructure Delivery Fund, with other elements coming from the government’s Growth Deal, National Highways and Homes England.
However, the arrangement has been under review in recent years, due to what an October 2022 City Deal meeting heard were “a number of risks” which had crystalised as delivery had continued.
It is not known when or if another proposed City Deal road project - the conversion into a dual carriageway of the entire length of the A582 between Lostock Hall and the Broad Oak roundabout in Penwortham - will go ahead.
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