In the past 25 or so years, it's become popular to justify regional highway projects by extending them as far as possible and claiming that the entire route makes sense as a continuous corridor. The idea is to sell the original regional project as a part of a supposedly more important whole in order to receive federal funding.
The purpose of this diary is not to argue for or against regional projects based on regional benefits and impacts, but to expose a more sinister way in which project promoters cheat by turning regional corridors into long-distance porkidors.
The extension of Interstate 69 is probably the most successful of these. (A 2010 book covers it in much more detail than Wikipedia.) It began as a proposed highway of arguable regional utility connecting Evansville to Indianapolis, being pushed at first by landowners from Washington, Indiana. When success was not forthcoming, the promoters hit on a winning strategy: combine it with existing highways in Kentucky, a "line on a map" across Arkansas, and questionable upgrades to already-four-lane rural highways in Texas, to extend existing I-69 from Indianapolis to Mexico, and promote it as a "NAFTA corridor". All but the cross-Arkansas segment were included as two of 21 "High Priority Corridors" in the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991, and the gap was later filled. As expected, progress has been slow, with only short segments being designated outside Indiana (which opened a 66-mile segment in 2012 and is on track for another 27 miles in 2014-15). Arkansas in particular has done nothing except a bypass around the mid-sized city of Monticello - and why should they without at least a better slice of federal funding?
The project that spurred me to write this diary is "Continental 1". The main thrust is clearly an upgrade of US 219 from Buffalo south to I-68 west of Cumberland, Maryland, but it is being promoted as "the 1,500-mile direct route from Toronto to Miami". OK, so that's presumably shorter than the current trip? Wrong. Plug in Toronto and Miami into the Goog and the route from downtown to downtown is 1485 miles, all Interstate or Queen Elizabeth Way except for 70 miles of good four-lane in West Virginia. But Corridor 1 will shorten the distance below that, right? Again wrong. Using unrealistic as-the-crow-flies straight lines between the US 219 freeway termini near Springville and Ebensburg and from Somerset to I-68 west of Grantsville, I get a total distance of 1484 miles. With their own map showing an obvious lack of benefit (though the calculation is necessary, since maps can be misleading), this is a case of willful lying.
If you look closely at that map of Corridor 1, you may also see a bump out to the east in the Carolinas. This is a third porkidor, the "I-73/74 North-South Corridor", extending I-74 from Cincinnati and creating I-73 through Michigan to meet in southern Ohio, then looping all over the place in the Carolinas to serve local bacony needs. The most egregious piece of this is I-74 east of its final split from I-73 at Rockingham, NC. Instead of taking the obvious route east to Wilmington, I-74 will abruptly turn south at Bolton, crossing the middle of nowhere to Shallotte before running southwest to Myrtle Beach. An official map from NCDOT shows the utter suckitude of the plan from absolutely every standpoint, except that of people going exactly to Shallotte and no farther.
So what about you? Have you had any experience with porkidors?