The town of Cullybackey, near Ballymena, had around 2400 residents in 2001. The structure of the narrow village main street makes it a significant bottleneck for traffic. A scheme to construct a throughpass to relieve the main street was considered for the current round of road improvements, but failed to meet the criteria. However, in 2008 a private developer agreed to construct the "central part" of the scheme as a condition of planning permission for a housing development in the town. Previous information suggests this may represent 20% of the whole route. It seems that Roads Service have agreed to construct the sections at either end if this happens, and has apparently progressed a preliminary design. There is no indication of when work will commence, or indeed if it will at all, given the current economic climate.

Route

There is no comprehensive map of the route on the Internet. However, we do know that it will run east-west in the area of land to the north of Main Street but to the south of Kilmakevit Road/Tobar Park. Zoom in on the map linked above for an idea of where this is. A small portion of the route was visible on this property developer's web site at the time of writing in Feb 2009. This allows us to construct a speculative map of the proposed road, visible here. The dark red shows what we know is planned, while the light red is conjecture (and may be incorrect). If anyone can shed any more certainty on this, please get in touch.