Utah Department of Transportation officials told Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. on Wednesday that the parkway, now about a third of the way to completion, is on time and on budget for its fall 2008 debut.

"We're redefining what a parkway is," Huntsman said, pausing during a tour of the project to take in a sweeping view of Legacy's northern end. "It will be a new driving experience, the likes of which we've never seen in any other state."

The $685 million parkway also will provide much-needed traffic congestion relief in south Davis County, where the Wasatch mountains nearly touch the Great Salt Lake, creating a pinch point that slows commuters to a crawl and inhibits easy transport of goods on one of the most important trade corridors in the nation.

Huntsman and officials from the Utah Department of Transportation on Wednesday toured all three segments of the 14-mile road project between the juncture of Interstates 15 and 215 in northern Salt Lake County and Parrish Lane in Centerville and U.S. 89 in Farmington.

On planning boards for more than 40 years, Legacy was designed as a scenic byway within a 100-mile freeway that former Gov. Mike Leavitt prematurely announced as a done deal in 1996.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted construction on Legacy in 2001 after the Sierra Club, Utahns for Better Transportation, the League of Women Voters, Friends of Great Salt Lake, Future Moves Coalition and Great Salt Lake Audubon proved the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hadn't followed federal environmental laws to protect lake wetlands and hadn't properly considered mass transit options.

Huntsman resuscitated the project shortly after he took office in January 2005 and ordered UDOT to figure out a way to settle the lawsuit. In November 2005, the Legislature ratified the settlement.

"But for the coalition of the willing, we'd still be in court," Huntsman said.

When the parkway opens in fall 2008 - the same time the Utah Transit Authority's FrontRunner commuter rail service is scheduled to start between Ogden and Salt Lake City - motorists will have two alternatives to running the gauntlet of I-15 traffic.

The parkway project is the first of its kind in Utah, the result of collaboration between environmentalists, civic groups, transit advocates, artists, architects and road engineers. The 2005 settlement terms include some unusual rules: The speed limit on the parkway will be 55 mph, heavy trucks will be prohibited and the road surface will minimize noise.

Pedestrian and equestrian trails, bikeways, interpretive centers, imaginative landscaping and a nature preserve will flank the roadway.

"It isn't just a drive, it's an experience," Huntsman said.

A significant part of the settlement was to set aside a 125-acre nature preserve, which UDOT will own in perpetuity. For now, however, there are no plans for public access to the preserve, which must under federal Clean Water Act provisions replace in form and function wetlands and wildfowl habitat destroyed during road construction. The habitat is crucial to the health of migratory birds on one of the world's most important flyways.

UDOT hopes to hand off management of the preserve in five years or so, said project design manager Bryan Adams. But it could be longer, said Lynn de Freitas, executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake and member of the collaborative design team UDOT organized to figure out long-term care of the preserve.

"We need to let science help drive the answers to the question of access," de Freitas said during a phone interview. "At the risk of sounding stand-offish, that really isn't the intent [of mitigation]. . . . People can't go into the heart of it like a Nature Conservancy preserve. Even Farmington Bay has limits on access during nesting and breeding time."