A trip through interior Southwestern Indiana is akin to going back two or three decades. The industry is light, the jobs sparse and the two-lane highways are congested, hilly and dangerous ... It’s a sad but real fact that emotion does not build great societies. Infrastructure does.

On any given Friday afternoon as you head north on Interstate 69 to Fort Wayne, the right hand lane is an almost constant parade of semi-trucks moving millions of tons of freight.

Between Indianapolis and Detroit there have been and still are countless automotive plants and suppliers. The old auto plants in places like Auburn and Fort Wayne have been replaced with Cooper Tire and GM Truck & Bus. Anderson has long been a major General Motors manufacturing center. At numerous interchanges along I-69 there are scores of automotive suppliers providing thousands of jobs and higher standards of living.

But when you compare that economic vitality with points southwest of Indianapolis, you find a different picture. Beyond Bedford and Mitchell — school bus manufacturing centers — you find Greene, Daviess, DuBois, Martin and Pike counties. These are the poorest counties of the state in per capita income and jobless rates. A trip through interior Southwestern Indiana is akin to going back two or three decades. The industry is light, the jobs sparse and the two-lane highways are congested, hilly and dangerous.

Those who protest a new highway most vigorously — including Daviess County farmers Jim Gilooly and Eugene Stoll — bring an obvious emotional element to the equation. Their homesteads are at stake — just as thousands of others have been throughout the building of the interstate system. It’s a sad but real fact that emotion does not build great societies. Infrastructure does.

When the earliest pioneers entered Indiana in 1816, the trading routes and developing population hubs occurred around rivers (Vincennes, Louisville, Fort Wayne). In the 1830s, commerce moved to a new network of canals. Twenty years later, it was the railroads, an economic development that lasted nearly a century and lifted Indianapolis as a bustling center of commerce to its first Golden Age of the 1880s and ’90s. The railroads helped create an Indiana that was commercially, culturally and politically vibrant, essential to American manifest destiny.

The National Road — U.S. 40 — was developed in the early part of the 20th century, signaling a new system of interconnecting highways. By the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower commenced the interstate highway system — four-lane highways modeled after Hitler’s autobahn. All these advancements in civilization crisscrossed Indiana and gave our state its slogan, “Crossroads of America.”

There are two glaring holes in the Hoosier state’s transportation and economic development picture. U.S. 31 connecting South Bend to Indianapolis is not up to interstate standards. Commerce is impeded by 20 stoplights from I-465 at Carmel/Westfield, and another 30 or so at Kokomo.

And then there is I-69, a magnificent trade route nearly 300 years in the making that abruptly stops at I-465, well short of its destiny.

Mid-continent opportunity

The Almanac of American Politics describes Evansville as the “capital of the neglected tag ends of three states” — Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. When Ike’s interstate system took off, Evansville — Indiana’s third largest city — was left behind. It is the only major population center in Indiana without a direct, four-lane link to the state capital. It is the farthest Indiana population area away from Indianapolis. The nine counties between Indianapolis and Evansville have become the state’s economic backwater. Five of them — Orange (8 percent), Greene (7.7 percent), Lawrence (5.9 percent), Martin (5.1 percent) and Pike (4.8 percent) — rank in the highest 25 counties when it comes to jobless rates (according to statistics compiled for February). That compares to Indiana’s 3.6 percent unemployment rate in what would have to be considered one of the state’s best peacetime economies. Compare that to the 10 counties that straddle I-69 between Indianapolis and Michigan — Hamilton (1.6 percent), Wells and Whitley (both 2.7 percent), Allen (3.1 percent), Steuben (3.3 percent), Huntington (3.8 percent), Delaware and DeKalb (both 4.1 percent), Madison (4.3 percent) and Grant (4.8 percent).

Farmer Jim Gilooly says a new highway is nothing more than an excuse for drivers to speed past his county. At most interstate interchanges, however, the reality is that there are nearby companies, factories, offices, jobs. John Schwartz, executive director of the Voices of I-69 organization, noted a 1994 study that showed that in the previous six years, 301 out of 377 manufacturing plants that established in Indiana were located within 10 miles of an interstate highway.

If you spend any time in Evansville, it’s easy to pick up an attitude of neglect. Nobody in Indianapolis understands the needs and desires of the state’s third-largest city, their community leaders say.

In a capitalist economy buffeted by global trends, little else stays static. When Congress passed and President Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, dropping tariffs and relaxing the borders of Canada, the United States and Mexico, a new opportunity dawned. So did the concept of the Mid-Continent Highway — an interstate that would link Port Huron, Mich., to Sarnia, Ontario, on the northern frontier, and McAllen, Texas, and Reynosa, Mexico, to the south.

It would link Indianapolis to Evansville, Memphis, Shreveport, Houston, Corpus Christi and McAllen southward, and Lansing, Flint, Port Huron, Toronto and Montreal to the north. It connects the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Great Lakes and the world’s most prolific bread basket, including the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, to the Gulf of Mexico.

Some, particularly organized labor, view NAFTA as a law that is pulling away Hoosier jobs (glass and electronics) to the cheaper labor markets of Mexico. The economic development community views Mexico, with its rapidly growing middle class, as a huge pool of potential consumers of the automobiles, steel, compact disks, medical equipment, farm produce and high technology produced in the Great Midwest.

The potential in economic development and commerce to those along this highway corridor over the next century would easily be in the hundreds of billions of dollars — dwarfing the initial costs of extending I-69. That is the most illogical argument opponents of the interstate make — that building the extension won’t be worth the investment. When I-69 and I-65 were being built four decades ago, no one was talking about GM Truck & Bus at Fort Wayne or Isuzu-Subaru at Lafayette locating there. No one could even begin to calculate the billions of dollars of economic impact those two plants alone have brought to their regions.

Look at the state’s biggest economic plums of the past generation — Toyota in Gibson County (within 20 miles of I-64); GM Truck & Bus on I-69 at Fort Wayne; Isuzu-Subaru at Lafayette (I-65); IN-Tek and IN-Kote near I-80/90. Chrysler’s new billion dollar plant in Kokomo is on U.S. 31.

Saving 10 minutes bullshit

Opponents to I-69 favor what Department of Transportation people call the “Terre Haute Route” — a route that would have motorists driving U.S. 41 north to Terre Haute, and then I-70 to Indianapolis. They say that I-69 will “only save 10 minutes” on a drive from Evansville to Indianapolis.

The I-69 proposal — otherwise know as the New Terrain Route —would essentially bring Indiana 37 from I-465 to Bloomington up to interstate standards, and then forge a new route through Monroe, Greene, Daviess, Pike, Gibson and Vanderburgh counties.

Environmental opponents to I-69 say that using the existing U.S. 41/I-70 route will save thousands of acres of farm lands and forests that the New Terrain Route south of Bloomington would devour. Business interests in Terre Haute fear they will lose revenue that might otherwise be funneled their way.

From an economic standpoint, they say bringing the Terre Haute Route up to interstate standards will be $600 million cheaper than building’s the New Terrain Route.

Here are the flaws in the opposition logic:

• Saving 10 minutes: The New Terrain Route through Bloomington from downtown Evansville to downtown Indianapolis would be 153.1 miles. The Terre Haute route would be 184.5 miles. Engineer Michael J. Feltz said in a report favoring the New Terrain Route that it would save a driver 31 miles and an estimated 30 minutes over the Terre Haute route.

• Saving farmland and forests: New Terrain Route proponents say that 90 percent of the land acquisition along the U.S. 41 route is “prime farmland.” Two lane frontage roads on both sides of U.S. 41 would have to be built since there is no parallel collector route that is the case with I-70 and U.S. 40 between Indianapolis and Terre Haute. There are also eight interchanges and hundreds of at-grade intersections that would have to be eliminated for the 289 county roads, driveways, farming access routes on the west side of U.S. 41, and the 314 roads and driveways that have direct access to 41 on the east side. Thirty of those intersections have traffic signals. Feltz observed, “Over 90 percent of the land along U.S. 41 between Evansville and Terre Haute is prime farm property, which is a much higher amount than along the Bloomington route.”

The environmental protests against the I-69 extension are curious, given the fact that another major transportation route — the four-lane Hoosier Heartland highway running along the Wabash River valley from Lafayette and Fort Wayne — is under construction. It will be built through prime farmland, wetlands and forests along the valley. Yet the environmental community has been strangely silent.

• Economic development and community impact: Widening U.S. 41 would virtually destroy the downtown business districts of the small towns of Fort Branch, Patoka, Carlisle and Farmersburg. The Terre Haute Route would offer virtually no economic development impact for Pike, Daviess, Greene and Monroe counties. The per capita income in that area averages 68th out of 92 counties, compared to 55 out of 92 counties for the Terre Haute route (Knox, Sullivan and Vigo counties).

• Savings on the road: Construction costs for the New Terrain Route are estimated to be $1.03 billion, according to engineers James Q. Morley, C. David Matthews and Feltz. The Terre Haute Route would cost $1.02 billion. But the acquisition of right of ways and relocation costs along the Terre Haute Route are estimated to be $120 million, as opposed to $55 million for the New Terrain Route. Lost in this debate would be the probable need of expanding the already congested I-70 between Terre Haute and Indianapolis from four to six lanes.

View through the windshield (or the dust)

If Indiana stalls on extending I-69 by the time the highway is completed at Memphis, Voices of I-69’s John Schwartz worries that the federal government could designate interstates 55 and 57 in Illinois as the Mid-Continent corridor, with a junction at I-94 that would take the commerce up to Port Huron and beyond, largely bypassing Indiana.

Gone would be the advantages of putting Indianapolis in the middle of a hemispheric trade route. John Bartlow Martin wrote in his 1947 book Indiana: An Interpretation About the State at the Turn of the Last Century: “Somewhere in those years Indiana, lusty child of the Civil War and pioneer capitalism, lost its way. The material progress of Indiana was arrested. It had seemed limitless in 1900, but it was stunted by some of the very men of vision who had created it — the early capitalists. In almost every small city one can hear tales of how the Chamber of Commerce discouraged outside manufacturers from building plants here. Why today is not a single automobile made in Indianapolis? True, Henry Ford made Detroit a lodestone and water transport on the Great Lakes is cheap. But there is a widely held belief that the local industrialists and bankers discouraged Ford from locating in Indianapolis.”

With the I-69 extension question, Hoosiers have the choice of viewing the next century through the windshield — or eating the dust of aggressive neighbors.

bhowey@nuvo.net