Editor's note
David Morgan is a caring person in the care business. On the Who Gets What? podcast, he details the mission and style of his facilities and the services they perform. Catch it all at Who Gets What? from mortonjohn.libsyn.com.
Don’t quibble. Yes, of course, people are important. We don’t discredit the sob stories about degraded humans all across this earth. But if we appreciated the land and its role in human affairs, we might have fewer sob stories.

And, No, this column has not been sponsored by the Indiana Farm Bureau. Primarily, this column is a tribute to the Kokomo by-pass and the recently completed I-69 route from Indianapolis to Evansville.

If you have traveled the Kokomo by-pass (US 31), you know there are no commercial or new residential activities at its interchanges. No bland warehouses line its path east of the famed, previous Kokomo parade of traffic lights, which once served as a by-pass.

Likewise, there is little that is new along the “new” I-69. It is basically an upgrading of four-lane SR 37, from I-465 and Harding St. in Indianapolis, south through Martinsville, to a point southwest of Bloomington.

The tragedy of highway construction in the past has been the inordinate “development” or degradation of adjacent land. We too easily forget the purpose of super-highways is not to make adjacent land owners rich, but to assist in the transport of goods and people between existing places.

We have to make choices about where we locate highways. The interstate system was intended to link cities, not destroy them.

Only Indianapolis among our major cities has two major interstates from the four cardinal directions feeding downtown.

This pattern is followed in other states as well. St. Louis and Chicago, Louisville and Cincinnati. Cleveland and Detroit, Nashville and Columbus (OH) are crossroads of interstates.

Each of these metropolitan centers have struggled to restore their downtowns to regional dominance. Circumferential highways (I-465 around Indiana’s capital city) have shifted commercial and residential activities away from the hub and spoke urban patterns of the past.

In smaller cities, like Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, Columbus (IN), South Bend, Elkhart, Michigan City, Bloomington, Anderson and Richmond, the interstates avoided downtown and drew development like economic magnets.

Today, we see the interstates lined with offices, apartment houses, warehouses, hospitals and retail centers vying for the open spaces between interchanges.

The worst of these are residential properties where occupants are subjected to heightened levels of pollutants and noise. When, local zoning boards permit these inappropriate developments, we witness greed merged with indifference.

Current users of I-69 between Bloomington and Evansville, as well as some travelers on the new Kokomo by-pass, complain about the lack of gas stations at the interchanges. Most of these complaints come from those experiencing bladder discomfort, not a need to refill, but to empty “the tank.”

But the lack of extraneous, intrusive “development” should be applauded as evidence of progress matched with preservation.
Morton J. Marcus is an economist formerly with the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. His column appears in Indiana newspapers, and his views can be followed his podcast.

© 2024 Morton J. Marcus

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