Indiana’s newest interstate highway has been in the news recently, and not in the positive way its longtime supporters would like.
A section of I-69 has sunk about eight inches, the highway having been inexplicably built over ground that had recently been extensively mined for coal.
And now these recent reports that an Indiana Department of Transportation official has personally financially benefited from the road’s construction.
Interstate 69 has been controversial since its conception many years ago, seen, alternately, as the route to southwestern Indiana’s economic revitalization and the road to the region’s perdition.
We’ve never been a big fan of the highway, which now stops near Scotland in southern Greene County. Given the need for investment in existing roads and bridges, spending so much money for so little seemed to us such a waste.
Granted, all those Evansville residents who were itching to finally see Scotland can now get there around a half an hour sooner than before the interstate was opened — if they aren’t delayed by one of the many car-deer accidents so prevalent along the way.
The plan is to extend the interstate, first to Bloomington and then, eventually, to Indianapolis, if the money can be found.
Gov. Pence, who says he’s committed to seeing the highway completed to its final destination, has talked about using a public-private partnership to pay for the work.
We’re not sure if that’s a euphemism for toll road, but there needs to be some way for I-69 to pay for itself and a toll road is as good a way as any other.
If construction is to continue, it would seem to us, given how poorly the current leg of the route has been constructed, that lawmakers should be hesitant to a continuation of the Daniels administration’s fast-track approach.
The former governor liked to push projects through, even though common sense should have injected a note of caution into his efforts, a voice from the shoulder advising, “Not so fast.”
Things like the building of I-69, like the move to daylight-saving time, which passed in the waning hours of the legislature by a single vote, may impress those who don’t live in Indiana but for the rest of us, who do proudly call Indiana our home, neither has panned out quite the way intended.
The switch to daylight-saving time, without the corresponding move of all the state into a single time zone, has only created a biannual confusion in many a household, sleepy Hoosiers getting up in the middle of the night to either spring forward or fall back in time, stubbing their toes as they search around half awake looking for clocks and DVRs and the instructions for the microwave.
We fear much the same outcome for the highway, whose reputation was sagging even before news that a section had sunk.
We’ve heard a number of comments to the effect that for a new road I-69 wasn’t a smooth ride, that parts had a decidedly “pie-crust” feel as one motored along over them, bumpety-bump, bumpety-bump, bumpety-bump.
And while the highway transports both tourists and the merely curious alike on their day trips to Scotland, other state-owned highways continue to crumble beneath the weight of their usual volume of everyday traffic.
The $900 million spent building Interstate 69 could have been better invested in repairing existing roads and bridges.
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