A bright, sunny morning on Sunday, March 4, 2007, saw 20,000 people swarming on to a traffic-less freeway.

In Albury, they walked, ran or biked it from a carnival-style event at Alexandra Park, where Lazy Harry sang a song about it all. In Wodonga, they made their way over the elevated concrete maze that straddles the Wodonga Creek, meeting the Albury mob on the river bridge.

And then a smiling John Howard, standing on a truck on the river bridge, snipped a green ribbon, named it the Spirit of Progress Bridge and declared the project open.

Yes, it's true thousands of local people would have preferred an external bypass.

But that was before they saw the new freeway for themselves.

On the day, the public response was overwhelmingly positive: “It's great, it's really good, the best thing to happen to Albury-Wodonga, etc.”

Ten years later, it's hard to imagine what it was like to have hundreds of trucks trundling through central Albury streets day and night, past houses, shops and schools.

As a Border Mail reporter, I had written countless stories about the external/internal debate since 1985.

Colleagues such as Peter Wilson and Tony Wright had done so since 1970, when talk of an expressway prompted a buy-up of homes in Parkinson Street.

In 1978, this newspaper trumpeted the “Inner Bypass Go-ahead” but it took another 29 years to come true as ministerial decisions swung like a pendulum between external and inner solutions.

Groups led by Chris Morgan, John Colquhoun, Marty Greig, Tom Jensen, Claire Douglas and Brian Waters fought passionately against an internal route.

In 1999,  Mrs Douglas almost ousted Liberal MP Ian Glachan from his Albury seat, the community and city council split and Albury polls clearly favoured an external route. That same year federal roads minister John Anderson, astonishingly reversed a decision by his predecessor, Mark Vaile, and approved both an external bypass and internal boulevard.

In September 2001, the two city councils, Save Our City (pro-external) and Access (pro-internal) reached a common position that both roads should proceed at once. It never happened, for NSW, having been asked to chip in $70 million, refused to pay a cent.

In Wodonga in 2002, the MPs Sussan Ley, Sophie Mirabella, Ian Glachan and Tony Plowman, mayors Patricia Gould and Lisa Mahood and their chief executives together told John Howard: Solve this! Seven months later Mr Howard overturned the Anderson decision and Ms Ley and Mrs Mirabella gleefully announced a 17.4km internal freeway.

Graeme Richardson's petition of 16,768 names opposing the decision got nowhere. Abigroup and its partners employed 3800 men and women on the 22-month project but, sadly, one worker, Mark Edgcumbe, died in an accident.

At $524 million, this was one of the nation's biggest federally-funded engineering projects. Interstate drivers save at least 10 minutes through Albury-Wodonga, while many local workers gain more time at home with family.

Several railway level crossings disappeared, new cycle-paths and parks emerged and a quieter Mate Street and Wagga Road were enhanced.

The freeway is thought to carry about 40,000 vehicles a day.