The Biggest Gaps in America’s Interstate Highway System

The interstate system was designed to connect highways across the U.S., creating efficient travel from city to city. In most cases, major cities have access to every other surrounding city, providing an easy way for cross-country travel, for trips, and commerce. But there are some situations where major cities are not connected to each other. These are what I call interstate gaps. There are plenty of important interstate gaps across the country that are worth talking about. So that's what I want to do today, talking about how these affect them in their cases, and what the future holds. Before that though, we're getting so close to my childhood dream of 100,000 subscribers, so please consider subscribing to the channel if you enjoy geography content like this. It's easy for you and it means so much to me as I get close to this massive milestone. Thank you! So these gaps can be seen everywhere, and they usually have to do with how the interstate system was designed. They couldn't make the original design too extensive, so especially in the West, states got a lot less overall interstate miles. It had a lot to do with political pull, with a state like Illinois basically getting every single city connected to the system, while somewhere like California had a city like Fresno with a metro population over 1 million residents that went unserved. This doesn't necessarily mean all of our examples will be out West, but it's food for thought. I also need to say that just because there's an interstate gap doesn't mean I'm saying we need to build an interstate there. In some situations, I feel it would help, but in others, it's fine as is. With that though, there's one obvious interstate gap that I have to start with, and that is Phoenix and Las Vegas. These two metropolitan areas are some of the largest in the Western US, with the population of Phoenix nearing 5 million, and Las Vegas at 2.3 million. The fact that there is no direct connection by interstate between these two cities is atrocious, but it's easy to explain. Basically, we just have to look at 1960. Both of these cities are in the desert, so they only really started growing around the late 50s. Phoenix had a population of 584,000, making it a fairly large city for its time, but Las Vegas had around 92,000 residents. That's like if we were making a big deal about Huntsville, Alabama not being connected to Muscle Shoals, which I hope puts some of this into perspective. Plus, in 1950, when things were probably actually being designed, Phoenix had just 110,000 residents. Present day though, everyone knows this is a much-needed highway route. The current connection of US-93 goes down to as few as two lanes near Wickenburg, and it's a very dangerous route currently. The plan for I-11 to connect the cities has been approved, but we're still waiting for action on that, creating one of the strangest interstate gaps in the country. Another one that I've always found interesting is the lack of a connection between Houston and Austin, Texas. Now this one is a bit more of an interesting situation, just because of Texas's freeway layout. Currently, I-10 goes between San Antonio and Houston, with Austin being located just north of San Antonio. This means if a highway were to be built, it would look pretty strange, with Houston having like a bunch of little fingers coming out of it. I guess that's not actually a great example, but Austin has a metro population of 2.4 million, and Houston is the 5th largest in the country at 7.5 million. You'd think that they could make the 111-mile connection between these two massive metropolises, and I have more thoughts to back that up. Texas has always been known as a state that will build freeways and interstates. There are multiple interstates under construction right now, so you'd think a connection on this high-traffic route would be approved by now. Just adding on to that, State Route 71 is nearly all limited access and could be upgraded to become a spur route like I-135 maybe. This would get them federal funding and provide a much-needed safer connection, but currently that is not in the works, which probably isn't a bad thing, since they still need to finish I-69 and I-14. While we're here, I also wanted to cover Houston and Corpus Christi. This is a smaller example, because as I just mentioned with I-69, the interstate is currently being constructed between the two cities. It's still worth mentioning that Corpus Christi has a population near 500,000, and there is a lack of a connection between these two cities by interstate. What's more important, though, is that this would also provide a connection between Houston and the Rio Grande Valley, so really it would be a connection to around 2 million people. Next up, we stay in Texas, sort of, because it's a very different situation. I've got the interstate gap between Denver and Amarillo, or Oklahoma City. Basically, what we're looking at is this massive region with no interstates that ends up often being very important for traffic to Denver from the southeast, even into places like Dallas. So Denver has a population of just over 3 million, and it continues to grow. Oklahoma City is right around 1.5 million, and even though Amarillo is smaller at 270,000, my point still stands about the gap. If you want to go from Oklahoma City to Denver, you end up taking 18 different turns in rural areas before getting back on an interstate. It's confusing and slow, but it has the same reasoning where these cities simply weren't large enough for it to be justified in the 50s. But present day, this is a strange lack of a connection. There's two options for a potential interstate highway, with the first one being basically a straight shot from Oklahoma City to Denver, possibly connecting Garden City and Dodge City as well, and the second option would simply be fully upgrading the little triangle between Amarillo and Raton. This would simply be a continuation of I-27, and it would be much less expensive and extensive. Moving on to another large interstate gap, we go to the east where we have Tallahassee, Florida and Montgomery, Alabama. This is one I found interesting, mostly because of the fact that it's in the east, where interstates are much more common. Montgomery has 385,000 residents, and Tallahassee is around the same size. But I still find it strange that there's no interstate or even limited access connection between these two cities, instead taking you through Troy, Ozark, and Dothan on US-231. For this one, my thought is that a route would have been designed here, since it really ends up connecting the entire state of Florida up to Montgomery and Birmingham, and I don't need to remind you how much population is coming from that darn peninsula. Montgomery and Tallahassee alone are two important southern capital cities, so providing a connection would be in the best interest of both cities. Maybe there could have been an I-65 east and an I-65 west situation, where one goes towards Mobile and the other goes towards Florida. Either way, neither city is growing at any sort of fast rate, so it isn't going to happen. Next, I want to talk about the Twin Cities, the 16th largest metro in the US, with 3.7 million residents. With this city, there's a couple gaps that I wanted to talk about. First, and more importantly, the gap between Minneapolis and Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The thought here is that Minneapolis is a massive city, with an extensive freeway system, yet there's just two major interstate routes that pass through the metro. You'd think there would be another interstate moving southwest outside the city towards Sioux Falls, an important neighboring city with 300,000 residents. That size is nothing special, but the thought is that this ends up connecting Minneapolis to basically the entire west. If you want to go to a city like Denver, Salt Lake City, Boise, or Missoula, you have two options, those being either going straight south on I-35 towards Des Moines, or taking a less exact route on US-169 and SR-60. Adding onto this, you'd think there would be some sort of interstate connection to the southeast as well, toward Rochester. Rochester is a very close city, only around 61 miles from the Twin Cities. It's already a few miles off I-90, so it's getting screwed in that department. But you'd think since these cities are buddies and love each other, they'd say pretty pleased can we get an interstate. I don't know man, I guess the interstate planners just didn't like Minneapolis back in the day, they must have been Packers fans. Those are the examples I wanted to go over in this video though, and overall, I think it's an interesting topic to cover. There was an exact plan that went into the interstate system, but I can't help but think that there was a lot more that went into this planning process than just which cities could be connected. We know the US government doesn't have the capability to be unbiased. Thanks for watching. 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