 Over the next five years, West Sussex County Council will be investing millions of pounds on major projects across the county, such as schools, roads and social care, to ensure we are well placed to meet the demands of the future. With increasing housing and a growing population comes increased demand on the county's roads, including the A259 in East Arran, which forms part of the West Sussex Strategic Road Network. This stretch of the busy A road is already one of the most congested routes in West Sussex. With commuters experiencing long queues and slow-moving traffic, and journeys taking up to four times longer than they should. The congestion on the A259 affects me when I want to travel between Little Hampton and Goring. That's mainly to either travelling to work or seeing my family. What is pretty much a 10 or 15 minute journey can sometimes take me up to 40 minutes and you really have to plan that in. And especially if you're running late for work or trying to get kids to school or something like that, then it can be a real nightmare. As more people move to the area and there's more interesting people coming shopping to the area, I think it's really important that we improve the roads so we're not all just sitting in traffic all the time. As a retired local resident, I don't have to worry about travelling at rush hour, but this is continual here now and it's going to obviously get worse if development comes at the volume we understand it will be. I think there's plenty of room here to put it into dual carriageway in some areas along here and also to widen the roundabouts. I think the roundabouts are too narrow. They could be widened a lot, which would take more capacity even on the roundabout to help. As a local resident, the A259 affects me because it's my main route to get through to where I need to go, be it for work or for personal use. I think to improve the A259, it possibly needs better roundabouts, dual carriageways or both. Well it would be a lot better for the community, I'm sure it will be. Look at it now, I mean the traffic is on this road now. If that was a dual carriageway, it would be a lot better. Plans for improvement have now been approved, subject to public consultation to dual the existing stretches of single carriageway and improve access to roundabouts and junctions between Bridge Road roundabout in Little Hampton to the west and Goring Crossways roundabout in Worthing to the east. This will be jointly funded by West Sussex County Council, developer contributions and government grants secured through the Coaster Capital Local Enterprise Partnership. Improvements to the A259 will bring reduced congestion, fewer delays, improved reliability of journey times. It will also provide us with the highway capacity we need to enable new homes to be built, new employment space to be built, which means the creation of new jobs. The benefits of this scheme have been calculated to be £100 million worth of financial benefits. Now that's been calculated by adding up all of the journey time savings, by calculating the number of accidents that we expect to be reduced and by adding up the wider economic impacts to the area of creating new jobs and building new homes. Over the next 10 to 15 years in the East Arran area, we can see that around 2,600 new homes are going to be built. We are expecting there to be around 4,000 to 5,000 new jobs created and we need the highway capacity in order to accommodate all of that growth. The works will be approached in three planned phases. Phase one will include the stretch of the A259 from the Fitzallan Link Road roundabout in Little Hampton to the A280 roundabout near Roundstone. Improvements to this section will include dueling the current single lane carriageway in both directions, alterations to the station road, body shop and A280 roundabouts including wider approaches and improved road markings and new pedestrian and cycle paths. The cost for this work is estimated at £14.8 million with construction predicted to start in 2017. Phases two and three will see the Bridge Road roundabout in Little Hampton and the Goring Crossways roundabout in Worthing improved. Plans are for new and larger roundabouts with wider approaches and improved road markings. Junction improvements to the Bridge Road roundabout are included as well as new pedestrian and cycle paths. Estimated costs for phases two and three are between £4 million and £9 million but the time frame is dependent on funding and there is no confirmed start date yet for this work. By making improvements to one of West Sussex's busiest roads now we can ensure that this critical part of our strategic road network keeps moving and continues to support the county's economic development long into the future.