I-55 A BIG PLUS

Dwight Eisenhower's plan to establish a ribbon of highways that would move military troops and equipment efficiently around the country has been a godsend to travelers and the communities through which they pass.

Forty years after construction of the nation's interstate highway system began on I-70 near St. Louis, Americans have become accustomed to traveling cross-country -- or across town -- with ease. Cities touched by the highways have seen new businesses spring up around interchanges, and interstate access alone has served to attract new industries. Retail businesses and manufacturers operate more efficiently because goods can be shipped farther more expeditiously. The trucking industry has grown by leaps and bounds.

Hard telling how many lives interstates have been responsible for saving. Longtime Southeast Missouri residents can remember what it was like to travel from Cape Girardeau to St. Louis on old Highway 61 before the last leg of I-55 between Fruitland and Brewer was opened in 1972. The treacherous two-lane highway, filled with hills and curves, carried thousands of cars and trucks daily at speeds up to 70 mph, the speed limit then. Not a weekend went by that someone wasn't killed, and multiple-fatality accidents were commonplace.

So treacherous and time consuming was the trip that many instead traveled to and from St. Louis along Illinois Highway 3, crossing the Mississippi River at Cape Girardeau and East St. Louis. It was a much better highway that carried fewer vehicles. As sections of I-55 opened sporadically between here and St. Louis, more people traveled the Missouri route. But that put even heavier traffic on the sections of Highway 61 that were still being used as I-55 was being built.

Today, motorists can travel to and from St. Louis in the short span of two hours, a trip that took three or more hours on Highway 61. Fatalities along the interstate are the exception, not the rule, as they were when Highway 61 was so heavily traveled.

It is hard to imagine what the nation would be like today without interstate highways. Like the railroads long before them, interstates have delivered prosperity to many communities that had gone unnoticed because there was no highway to take people there. The interstates were built, and the people came.