Midwest Tries to Get Kicks Supporting New Route 66 : Transportation: This time it would be an interstate. It would link ‘forgotten cities’ bypassed by freeways.

Stirring memories of motor courts and blue-plate specials, of Okie caravans, Burma Shave signs and quarter-a-gallon gas, a group of Midwestern businessmen and politicians are trying to gather support for construction of a new Route 66 across the continental United States.

This time, it would be called Interstate 66 and, stretching from northern Virginia to central California, it would be the first coast-to-coast interstate highway to be undertaken in more than three decades.

Cutting a new trail across the country, I-66 would not go through Joplin, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup or any of the towns celebrated in the famous road song with the jaunty refrain, “Get your kicks on Route 66.”

Advocates are calling the proposed interstate the highway to America’s “forgotten cities”--places such as Paducah, Ky., Cape Girardeau, Mo. and Trinidad, Colo., towns that were bypassed by the golden era of freeway building during the 1950s and are now slowly losing population and jobs.

Like the Oklahoma boosters who conceived of the original Route 66 in the 1920s, promoters of I-66 see it as a means of stimulating tourism and business opportunities.

“We believe that a project like this one would help give the nation’s heartland a new lease on life,” said Glen Dockery, special assistant to the mayor of Wichita, Kan., and head of the group pushing for the new highway.

While Dockery and his associates appear to have generated a lot of enthusiasm along the proposed route, they still have a long road to hoe. Officials of the Federal Highway Administration say the I-66 project is not a top priority, and environmentalists do not warm to the prospect of a six-lane superhighway that would cross some of the most pristine landscape in the Southwest.

Preliminary estimates indicate the freeway would cost $20 billion in federal taxpayer dollars and take 20 years to complete. In an age when the federal government does not have enough money to repair many existing roads, the idea of building a new interstate highway may strike a lot of people as folly.

Final approval hinges on the willingness of states along the route to spend their federal and state transportation money and on federal approval of design and environmental safeguards. If the project requires special financing, congressional approval would be needed.

Project sponsors, including about 25 cities along the route, have already made headway. They have formed an association, Interstate 66 Project Inc., hired consultants and lobbyists, produced a promotional videotape and recently persuaded the House of Representatives to appropriate $1.5 million for a feasibility study that would determine the exact route. The Senate is now considering the funding proposal.

In at least one state along the route, New Mexico, state officials have begun holding town meetings to discuss the project’s merits.

The proposed interstate has aroused interest in California, where San Joaquin Valley officials in Kern and Fresno counties say they would get behind the project if it is likely to boost local economies. Promoters of I-66 insist that it would.

“The biggest thing we are trying to sell about this project is that it would link local economies closer together with the national economy,” said Walter Wildman, director of the Regional Commerce and Growth Assn. of Southeast Missouri and one of the architects of the I-66 project.

“In California, we’re offering the possibility of transporting all the produce out of the San Joaquin Valley to the Midwest a half-day to a day quicker than what can be done on the existing routes.” The routes Wildman was referring to are Interstates 70 and 40, the two east-west interstates closest to the San Joaquin Valley.

Elsewhere along the route, in Appalachia and Colorado’s San Luis Valley, some of the nation’s poorest and most isolated agricultural regions would gain new access to major markets on the East and West coasts as well as the Midwest, according to Wildman.

Sponsors of the I-66 project have not charted a precise course across the country, but they have drawn a 50-mile-wide corridor. Passing through nine states, this corridor crosses a stand of rural America inhabited by about 12 million people, where the largest cities include Fresno, Wichita, Lexington, Ky. and Huntington, W. Va.

The proposed I-66 corridor begins in California near the juncture of Interstate 5 west of Fresno and extends east across the Sierra Nevada into southern Nevada. It straddles the Arizona-Utah boundary, passing into New Mexico and southern Colorado and on to southern Kansas and Missouri. It crosses the Mississippi River into southern Illinois, through central Kentucky and West Virginia, and into western Maryland and northern Virginia.

Most of the new construction would occur along the western two-thirds of the route. Eastward from Kentucky, roadwork would involve improving and connecting existing limited access highways. I-66 already exists as a 65-mile stretch of limited access freeway from Washington, D.C. to western Virginia, where it could merge with the transcontinental route.

On its way across the country, the I-66 corridor passes through 13 national forests, 11 national parks, five game preserves and five Indian reservations. Sequoia National Forest, Death Valley, Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Mesa Verde National Park and Great Sand Dunes National Monument are along the proposed route.

Project sponsors say that they are aware of the many natural wonders along the route and insist that they can build the six-lane interstate with a minimum of intrusion.

“If you remember back in Eisenhower’s days when they decided to build the interstate system, they didn’t ask anybody, they just built them,” Wildman said. “We aresavvy enough to know that in order to build anything of this magnitude today, you’re going to have to be extremely sensitive and responsive to environmental concerns. It’s not going to make it easier, but we feel very strongly that’s the way it should be.”

Where the road builders and environmentalists are likely to clash is over the notion that there is merit to bringing more people and commercial development closer to nature.

“The corridor would make many of the country’s most isolated national forests, national parks, archeological sites, and areas of natural scenery available to our population,” states a 30-page consultant’s report commissioned by I-66 sponsors.

Although final approval by the federal government of I-66 may be a long way away, environmental groups are already making their objections known.

“I think we would have a lot of serious concerns about opening up areas that are archeologically rich, especially on the Indian reservations and in the southern part of Utah, northern part of Arizona that have been protected by their very remoteness now,” said Robert Smith, southwestern representative of the Sierra Club.

“With a major project like a freeway goes the assumption that there will be little trailer towns and associated industries, businesses that grow up along those that would be a lot better stuck in an existing transportation corridor,” Smith said.

The I-66 project grew out of the local concerns of a string of towns in southern Missouri and southwestern Kentucky. Officials there believe that a superhighway could merge isolated communities, where unemployment often runs into double figures, into busy metropolitan corridors.

“The bottom line of this whole effort is to create an economic condition that when our children graduate from high school and have the option of staying here or not, they don’t feel like they have to go to a larger city to make a living,” Wildman said.

Interest in the proposed interstate spread westward and two years ago, Wildman said, 75 local officials and business leaders met in St. Louis and established a project committee.

While they work to drum up support as far west as Fresno, the Missouri- and Kansas-based architects of the I-66 project acknowledge it is their part of the country that stands to gain the most.

“It’s the Midwestern area, perhaps more than any other, that will benefit most from the linking of major rural producing areas with major urban and rural population centers,” says the narrator of an I-66 videotape that is being circulated along the route.

Meanwhile, the national case for I-66 is being made in Congress by Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.), who argues that in 20 years--the time it would take to build I-66--traffic on the two other east-west interstates could be nearing gridlock. Glickman and other proponents of the new road argue that it could reduce traffic on I-40 and I-70 by about one-third and reduce accident rates by up to 20% by removing a significant amount of truck traffic.

If the new east-west interstate makes a lot of sense to Glickman and his constituents back in Wichita, they still have to make a convincing case to federal highway administrators. Although officials there say they will study the idea if Congress sets aside the money, they do not believe that traffic on Interstates 40 and 70 warrants building a new highway.

If there are going to be new additions to the nation’s 42,000-mile interstate system, at least two other proposed routes make more sense, said Kevin Heanue, executive director of planning for FHA.

One of the two would go from Shreveport, La., to Kansas City; another from St. Louis, Mo., to St. Paul, Minn., Heanue said.

Yet, federal highway officials say interstate planning is becoming more decentralized and if the states along a proposed route want to build a new interstate, they can.

“The way it works now, the highway program is a federal aid program to the states and it’s the states who decide what to build,” said Anthony Kane, associate administrator for engineering at FHA.

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