It has taken 24 years and cost $15 billion, but the 657-kilometre new dual carriageway Pacific Highway between Newcastle and the Queensland border is finally finished.
The completion of the road was officially celebrated in a ceremony at New Italy on the Woolgoolga to Ballina section of the highway, which was the final upgraded stretch to open to traffic.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison was among the throng of state and federal politicians at the ceremony.
"The Pacific Highway has so many sad stories, tragic terrible stories," the PM said.
"And I remember watching it on the news when I was younger, and as the years went on, and hearing people say, 'somebody needs to do something about this, this has to be fixed'," he said.
"Well, it's fixed."
The New South Wales chief coroner called for the highway to be urgently upgraded in 1990 after two of the worst road accidents in Australia's history.
In 1989 a bus crash at Cowper, north of Grafton, killed 21 people and injured 22 others.
Former State Emergency Service deputy controller Dieter Meszaros was one of the first on the scene.
"Having to step over deceased persons to get to the living, and of course the victims themselves realising family members had passed away … that's what I remember," he said.
"The highway was a goat track, and the SES callouts to accidents averaged one or two a fortnight."
Two months later, two buses collided further south on the Pacific Highway at Clybucca, near Kempsey. Thirty-five people died and 41 were injured.
Altogether, between 1989 and 2019, 1,105 people were killed on the highway.
'Highway was dreadful'
General practitioner Raymond Jones was also one of the first at the Cowper crash, and has campaigned for a highway upgrade ever since with the Doctors for a Safe Pacific Highway group.
"I don't think I've slept through the night for the past 30 years, Cowper was a scene of incredible trauma," Dr Jones said.
"I used to work at the Grafton hospital and we used to see some horrendous injuries and accidents from multiple car accidents which were totally preventable in that the highway was just a goat track.
"I just knew that the highway was dreadful and that these accidents would never cease until the government spent the money and did it up."
Work on the upgrade did not begin until 1996, but the project gained more funding and momentum after 11-year-old Max McGregor was killed when a truck smashed through the home he was sleeping in at Urunga near Coffs Harbour.
"It wasn't until an unbelievably horrible thing happened that they (the government) decided to put their hands in their pockets and spend some cash," Dr Jones said.
"The highway should have been upgraded years before that, for the amount of traffic that it carried and the amount of trauma and deaths that were occurring."
The Pacific Highway road toll has dropped as work on the upgrade has progressed. In 1989, 123 lives were lost, while 10 years later the count was 53. In 2018, seven people were killed, but last year the toll increased to 16.
Dr Jones said the completion of the upgrade was a massive relief.
"I feel so elated that it's finally finished," he said.
"The police, the SES, the ambos, the firies, the people involved in the accidents … they've all been incredibly traumatised.
"We worked incredibly hard for many, many years to get the government to spend the money."
