Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 14, 1994 TAG: 9405170042
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
One new number was "83," as in "Interstate 83," a designation heretofore unmentioned in talk of bringing a new Interstate 73 through the New River and Roanoke valleys.
The other new number, far more important, was $5 million, as in $5 million to start the planning for an interstate-highway link between Roanoke and the Triad region of North Carolina.
Politics is often messy, and highway politics can be as messy as any. But in this case, the result is wisdom. Credit a bipartisan effort by 6th District Republican Robert Goodlatte and 5th District Democrat L. F. Payne for pushing to get on track the most critically needed Virginia element of the larger I-73 concept.
By separating the Roanoke Valley to Greensboro/Winston-Salem link from the larger I-73 proposal, the subcommittee was able to defer decisions on the host of issues that accompany the latter (including the dispute over whether it should come through the New River and Roanoke valleys at all) - and still attend to the most urgent road need in the region: an interstate highway between the Roanoke and Triad regions.
The urgency stems from the inadequacy of existing U.S. 220 between Roanoke and Greensboro for current, let alone future, traffic.
That highway not only connects two metropolitan areas. And it not only plugs a gap (however unsatisfactorily) in the interstate-highway system, by connecting I-40 in the Triad to I-81 in the Roanoke Valley.
It is also a lifeline for the surprisingly populous and industrialized region between the Roanoke Valley and the Triad. A total of about 200,000 people live in the Franklin County and the Martinsville-Henry County area north of the Virginia-North Carolina border and in Rockingham County, N.C., south of it.
But the lifeline, fine in its day (at least in the divided-highway Virginia portion) when traffic was slower and less voluminous, is frayed. Between 1985 and 1992, the Martinsville-Henry County area alone lost 3,000 - or 30 percent - of its industrial jobs. Business leaders have cited U.S. 220's shortcomings in moving goods to market as one reason for the job losses. In a sense, the newly dubbed I-83 proposal is as much an economic-survival project as an economic-development one.
None of this lessens the attractiveness of a "smart road" between Roanoke and Blacksburg, the middle Virginia leg of the I-73 idea. Also of eventual importance, for connecting with I-77 and the rest of I-73 if it is built, is the proposed I-73 link from Blacksburg to Bluefield - though that may entail only modest upgrading of existing U.S. 460.
Some I-73 critics seem to comprehend interstate highways only as connecting their most extreme points, in this instance Detroit and the South Carolina coast. But in an era when the geography of the American economy is taking shape as a collection of city-states, the I-73 proposal is better seen as a connection between metropolitan areas: Detroit to Columbus, Ohio; Columbus to the Ashland, Ky.-Huntington, W.Va. city-state; Ashland-Huntington to Bluefield-Princeton, W.Va. (no metropolis, but a given for political reasons); Bluefield-Princeton to the Roanoke Valley; the Roanoke Valley to the North Carolina Triad.
The call of the urgent has been heard. But let's continue to keep in mind the bigger picture - the I-73 vision.
by CNB