The Clackmannanshire Bridge was opened on November 19th, 2008 by the then First Minister Alex Salmond. The scheme, costing £120 million, was built to reduce traffic on and around the adjacent Kincardine Bridge, opened in 1936 and to form a bypass for Kincardine village itself. Around 20,000 vehicles a day were expected to use the new crossing, which is three-quarters of a mile long and weighs in at around 35,000 tons. The bridge was named after the county of Clackmannanshire following a campaign in the media, despite the south end of the bridge being in Falkirk District and the north end being in Fife. This is because the bridge is providing a vital link to the people of Clackmannanshire to central Scotland's motorway network.
Major improvements to the connecting trunk road network were also carried out, with almost four miles of roads and three miles of cycleways constructed. The bridge project provides a faster link to the A907 for Alloa, A977 to Kinross and Perthshire, and the A907 Oakley route to Dunfermline. The Kincardine Bridge continues to give direct access to Kincardine, as well as the A985 Kincardine bypass, which provides ongoing travel eastward to the south of Dunfermline and Rosyth.
The bypass scheme has been very effective for Kincardine itself, once a choke point to the north of Kincardine Bridge, now a much quieter village, which at its peak saw over 30,000 vehicles per day pass through. Today roughly 14,000 vehicles cross Clackmannanshire Bridge each day.
The Kincardine and Clackmannanshire Bridges are often exceptionally busy on days when the Forth Bridges at Edinburgh are closed due to weather.