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    Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway
    Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway
    Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway
    Audiobook12 hours

    Interstate 69: The Unfinished History of the Last Great American Highway

    Written by Matt Dellinger

    Narrated by Robert Fass

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    About this audiobook

    New Yorker contributor and decade-long staffer Matt Dellinger uses the controversy surrounding Interstate 69 as a lens through which to examine middle America's current political, social, and economic landscape, including hot-button issues like NAFTA and the country's troubled infrastructure. If completed, I-69 will stretch from Canada to Mexico through Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. In the works for more than twenty years, the highway has been both eagerly anticipated as an economic godsend and the center of a firestorm of protests by local environmentalists, farmers, ranchers, anarchists, and others who question both the wisdom of building more highways and the merits of globalization.

    Part history, part travelogue, Interstate 69 chronicles the last great highway project in America, introducing the people who have worked tirelessly to build it or stop it from being built, and the many places it would change forever.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 31, 2010
    ISBN9781400187928
    Author

    Matt Dellinger

    Matt Dellinger has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Oxford American, Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal magazine, and The New York Times and has reported on transportation and planning for the public radio program The Takeaway. He worked for ten years on staff at The New Yorker as an illustrations editor, the magazine’s first-ever multimedia editor, and the producer and host of The New Yorker Out Loud, the magazine’s first weekly podcast. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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    • 3/5
      The so-called NAFTA highway. Dellinger has traveled from Southeast Texas to Indiana exploring the history of the attempts to get this highway built. Some people are actively supporting the highway thinking it will bring good economic times to their impoverished communities and small towns. Others oppose it seeing the destruction of both natural habitats and historical areas.
    • 4/5
      A road book. No, not a travelogue type road book, a policy wonk type road book. The beginnings of the current iteration of I-69 date to 1991. It's often called the NAFTA highway- it proposes to connect southern Texas to Indianapolis. From there it will use the existing I-69 on to Canada. The world that existed when the Interstate system was built out from the 1950s through the 1970s is long gone. The money is gone. The fast-track system is gone. The political will for new big highways is gone. Interstate 69 covers the endless rounds of meetings by states, counties, cities, feds, advocacy groups, opposition groups, special interest groups, and politicos involved in the last two decades of trying to get I-69 built. Several people have devoted a huge chunk of their life to this highway. Some of them died along the way. As of today only stretches of the highway are built here and there along the proposed route. Some of them are less than two miles long. Completion dates are estimated from never to twenty more years. The Highway trust fund is basically broke. There's not even enough money there to maintain what is already built. Hard choices will have to be made in the future regarding funding of new highways in the US. Higher taxes (almost a non-starter), toll roads, or mileage fees. Everyone wants freeways but very few want to pay for them. Australia mandated private retirement accounts a few years ago. They need investments that are stable and pay out for decades. Along with Spain, they view US transportation as a area that fits these criteria. Decades long contracts with little risk. They have been involved in bidding of privatization of some toll systems- Chicago, Northern Indiana. This sends the conspiracy theorists into high gear and gives rise to some paranoid conclusions that are quite daft. All in all, this book covers the current climate of national roads in the US- a micro-system few of us ever delve into.