A £3million project aimed at ending the traffic chaos at East Lancashire's most notorious roundabout has been unveiled by highways bosses.

The Highways Agency has agreed to spend £1.8million installing traffic lights at each of the junctions leading onto the Whitebirk roundabout on the Blackburn/Hyndburn border.

Blackburn with Darwen Council and Hyndburn Council will invest money in the project, which will also see £600,000 spent on new bus lanes.

The roundabout, at junction six of the M65, serves two of the main routes into Blackburn, along with the principle road to Rishton and is the area's worst accident blackspot.

Work will start in January next year, although a completion date has not yet been revealed.

The scheme will involve wiping out the complex white traffic management markings which caused traffic delays after being put down by Lancashire County Council last year.

Blackburn with Darwen councillor for Whitebirk and Shadsworth, Coun Tony Humphrys was among those who criticised the white lines last year.

Today he said: "We welcome this because we were concerned about the lack of traffic control provision on that roundabout and the amount of accidents that were occurring.

"This will go a great way to reducing those accidents and help motorists to understand where they have to go rather than cross the roundabout at 50 or 60 mph."

Council bosses said today that the new scheme will create three lanes, increase capacity and improve safety.

The new signals, which will also involve stopping traffic on the roundabout itself, will ensure traffic flows more freely by preventing queues building up on any sliproad and also create three dedicated lanes, Blackburn with Darwen Council said today.

Since 2000, there have been 74 collisions on the roundabout, with 92 casualties as a result.The roundabout has seen more crashes than other accident blackspots, such as Haslingden's Grane Road.

Just one person has died on the roundabout, with 88 of the casualties being 'minor' injuries.

The roundabout was originally created when planners envisaged the M65 running around the edge of Blackburn town centre, rather than around the borough boundary as it does now.

The un-necessarily large carriageway encourages drivers to speed, according to highways bosses.

The new work will also remove one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the creation of the East Lancashire Gateway business park at Whitebirk, which is being funded by the North West Development Agency and should attract an inital 2,000 jobs to the area.

Without the improvements to the roundabout, its congestion levels could have led to the Highways Agency blocking the new business park on safety grounds.

Blackburn with Darwen Council leader Coun Kate Hollern said: "This is great news and will be welcomed by motorists and local businesses.

"The junction has been a nightmare for drivers for a long time and we believe that this will solve the problem."

Coun Andy Kay, in charge of regeneration at the council, said his authority had stepped in to fight for the money to help secure jobs within the borough, even though the roundabout itself was within Hyndburn.

Hyndburn Council leader Peter Britcliffe said: "This is excellent news which will address the problems currently caused by vehicles driving too fast at the roundabout.

"The accident levels at this junction are unacceptable but hopefully once work is complete, these should reduce dramatically."

A spokesman for the Department For Transport said research had concluded that placing lights on large roundabouts could lead to the number of accidents halving by regulating flow of traffic so that people don't have to guess when they should pull on to a roundabout.