My Ward colleague, Cllr Martyn Cox, has just informed me that Bolton Council have agreed to fund a £220 million infrastructure bid; a bid which includes a Westhoughton bypass. This is excellent news for our town.
I’ve called for an upgrade to our road network and infrastructure for many years now. Westhoughton needs traffic taken off its over-capacity road network and it needs what should be fairly quiet, residential streets to not be constantly full of traffic.
In 2016, I created this short film about the traffic problems we face in Westhoughton. Since then the situation has changed but not for the better – we now have the threat of 1000 houses and a golf course off Chequerbent, plus hundreds more houses across the town. With all this house building, we will now be over capacity according to the 2016 figures.
I absolutely welcome this new bid, I think it will be an excellent move that will strongly benefit our town. As long as it’s a real bypass and not a backdoor method of allowing building work on the green belt, I’m all for this. Westhoughton needs a new road to take the traffic we already have; not as a slipway for traffic of the future.