The human factor of interstate-69: Interrogating the discourse of 21st century transportation politics

For over two decades, Indiana has been actively engaged in extending Interstate-69 from Indianapolis through southwestern Indiana to Evansville on the Kentucky border for regional development. The Interstate-69 Extension in Indiana is part of the national project to develop the corridor from Canada to Mexico as a means of furthering goals supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The extension of I-69 has highlighted a complex network of power relationship inequalities among the stakeholders and actors representing national, state, and municipal governments, and their relationships with other public entities and individuals.;Based on a theoretical foundation of power and the production of space, American federalism, and place promotion, this research seeks to expose these underlying disparities and the perceptions of political power among the many stakeholders, and to analyze different discourses used to maintain or disrupt the established power relationships. The researcher analyzes the spoken discourse used during periods of participant observation, and from personal interviews at public hearings and private meetings. The researcher examines written discourse collected from archives of government documents, promotional materials, news articles, and meeting transcripts. The researcher found that the existing political power relationships are extremely resistant to change, and that the residents and local leaders in Bloomington, IN were largely unable to impact the final outcome of the highway. Further, legislative efforts to redistribute power in the process of constructing federal highways in the 21st Century only appear to be more democratic because the existing institutions and power networks persist in maintaining a centralized, top-down organization. There are plentiful implications for further research, especially in studies of federalism and critical transportation geography.