I Visited America's Interstate To Nowhere (I-180)

This is me and this is Interstate 180 in Illinois, one of the most iconic roads on this channel. The goal for today's video, visit the interstate, drive on it, look at Hennepin, look at the power plant, and basically just figure out what's going on there. You know, I've talked about this on the channel so many times, but I've never been able to visit it on camera. I'll do some on-ground research and show you guys what it actually looks like. That's the goal. It's just to be able to visualize probably one of the most important and stupidest interstates in the interstate system. So why is it so important to the channel? If you don't know, it has been dubbed pretty clearly the worst interstate in the country. I've already made a video about this, so the job in this video is pretty simple. First, I want to consider this interstate again, figuring out the general issues of it, and then I want to assess the things around the edges that we haven't looked at yet, like the village of Hennepin, the power plant north of town, and the real use of this interstate. Along the way, I'll document my extremely official trip to Interstate 180. It's nice to be back home after my trip to Illinois. It's kind of smelly down there. And I love my wonderful FlexiSpot C7 Max chair. And they're sponsoring today's video. Checking out my old chair. I'm sorry. This thing kind of sucked. Look at this new chair, though. This guy's amazing. When I'm working, I'm sitting in my chair for upwards of eight hours a day. And I've spent a lot of time over the past year looking for a new chair, which is why I'm so happy that FlexiSpot sent me this bad boy. I appreciate them a ton for that. We got this nice mesh material as an option. I absolutely love that. Then you've got things you can align to your exact features, like the headrest, then the backrest, then the lumbar support down here. I can even jump on it if I want. Look at this. So check out FlexiSpot. You can use my code C750 for $50 off and to be able to get the best price. There's the C5 chair, a great budget and high quality option, and then the newly launched C7 Morpher chair. There's a 30-day return policy and 10-year warranty with the direct replacement for damaged parts. Anyway, I really appreciate them for giving me this free chair, so please consider using the link below. Thank you, FlexiSpot. So Interstate 180, yet again, is a 13.19 mile long Spur route in central Illinois. The highway carries the least amount of travelers per day of any interstate in America, that being an AADT of under 4,000. You can see this first through all of my drone footage. If we look at this bad boy on a Sunday morning, there's just about no cars. I debated doing a bit in this video where I lay down on the interstate, if I had to guess I'd probably say that's illegal for one reason or another, I'm not 100% sure, but my point stands that this is entirely possible to do if you wanted to. So why does this 13.19 mile interstate exist? Well, you might think it's the small town of Hennepin at its southern terminus, but that is in fact not enough for an entire interstate to be built. No, instead it's actually because of this power plant that is located directly north of its southern terminus. Present day, it's a decently sized facility with absolutely nothing special going on, but it was built in the 1960s for this same reason of being mildly important to this small region. What's important is that at this time, Illinois was one of the largest states by population, and it certainly had a lot of political influence. You know, it was up there with New York and maybe California by this point, as the people who got everything they wanted in politics. Yes, this would coincide with the largest metropolitan areas in the country as well, so I think that's just something that naturally happened. Either way, Illinois politicians lobbied heavily for this 13-mile spur route to be built, so they did end up convincing everybody else. Presumably because nobody could really tell them no. They got it approved as a political favor, and so it was built in 1969 for their brand new power plant. Then, just about my favorite fun fact in the history of fun facts, is that this power plant closed shortly after the interstate was built. The timeline is as follows. Nice power plant was built. Terrible interstate is approved to connect to it and literally have no other function. Nice power plant closes, leaving the interstate going to absolutely nowhere relevant. So we now have one of the silliest situations in this random area of Illinois. The good news is that it's within the general driving distance of my house, so I took a very romantic weekend with my fiance to check this bad boy out. The main area that I started by investigating was the town of Hennepin. This is the main area of interest by what normal people would think, but I'm not so sure. So where I actually really wanted to look at was the town of Hennepin. Such a big part of what Interstate 180 is today is that there really isn't any use and so now the city that's actually served is Hennepin. Now this is a town of Right around 700 people now, it's really nothing crazy. You can see the downtown behind me, it's just about as much of a small Illinois downtown as you're going to get. This place isn't growing, and something interesting is that the access to Hennepin is actually really not that great. Like, when you're on the highway, you get off the highway, and you take a right, you take another right, and you go into town, but it's not like it's connecting straight up into Hennepin, and I think that actually is something interesting that I discovered. Maybe Hennepin isn't really where people are going on Interstate 180. It really is just kind of like a connecting interstate, you know. It's something different than just serving this tiny town that's here now. This is just kind of something that gets to use it now, really. I mean, I understand that there's the factory across the interstate and stuff, but it's still a really interesting little part of the story. Look at this bad boy, downtown Hennepin. It's just about three buildings going on here, and that is it. Going wild on a Sunday morning here. My original thought was that Hennepin was the main thing that it now connects to. But in actuality, there are a few rural communities south of the Illinois River. There's Granville and Oglesby, so you would think it provides general access to those communities. The other thought is that I-180 southbound turning into State Route 29. This one continues south towards Peoria, and it's an important aspect. There were certainly historic plans to expand the highway southward. You see it down in Peoria. The remnants of what was planned to go north towards I-180. In general, this region has too many freeways, so it's totally fine that it did get cancelled. Either way, if Peoria is the answer, that leaves this part of the highway useless again. And this would be totally backed up by the videos and drone footage. If you look around at what's going on, there's pretty much nothing. Things like the Goodman-Jessup Bridge contribute to the least used part of this highway. So the thing contributing here at this more unused part of the highway would be the Marquis Energy Plant. This is the very large plant that takes up 3,300 acres and it's going to provide a good bit of traffic. I didn't see that traffic because I went on a Sunday, but this is a key contributor to the highway that is otherwise pretty useless. Okay the next goal is to just get as close to the power plant as humanly possible. It was a private road at the actual interchange so we couldn't go in there but there's another way that we can get around and so I think I can get fairly close. I'm not trying to like sneak in or anything but I want to see it closer up. Okay I've decided this is the closest I can safely get. I'm not trying to go down any private roads and most of them just have a sign that says private entrance. This one did not have a sign so technically I can be here. We got a train right here. And then we got the power plant over there. You check it out. See it. Good. Good. Okay. I'm not going to like stick around though. Cause assumably if some car drives by, they're gonna be like, what are you doing here? They're like, yeah, just, just filming your factory. You know, you know how it goes. It does seem like an interesting facility. They got a lot of job openings. If anyone's interested, hashtag not sponsored either way, continuing on from there, the main mission was to drive down I-180 and see what it actually looked like. As I'll mention in the following segments in this video, there's a lot of construction going on on the highway. If you look back at Street View imagery throughout its history, you find that the condition in which this highway was in was subpar to say the least. It looked like that of a rural road that nobody had cared about since 1969. I think it's entirely possible that it really wasn't repaved for decades before now. They're finally getting to it, so good job Illinois DOT, I guess. But still, this is one of the worst interstates when it comes to overall road consistency and quality. So driving down the road, we see a lot of this stuff going on, and we see not a ton of people. So here's my experience documented for that. I will say, though, I appreciate that there's some sort of construction going on. It seems like they're actually putting effort into their highway a little bit now. It's taken about 40 years, but you can't fault them for everything. All in all, Interstate 180 is important for a reason. This is one of the best examples of the interstate really doing whatever it wants. There are people involved here, there are government involved here, and there are politics involved here. And so interstates like this are going to get built when you have other situations where an interstate technically could have been used, and especially in the 1960s, definitely could have been approved. But instead, things like this are the ones that get approved, and suddenly we have 13 miles of interstate mileage that is completely unnecessary. It's so important to my channel because we're assessing the interstate system, and Like, let's be real here, look at this interstate. So thank you to Interstate 180, there are plenty more highways around Illinois that are also pretty crappy just like this one. It's nice to explore the different interstates of America. Thanks for watching.