INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM AND DEVELOPMENT IN NONMETROPOLITAN AREAS

The current revival of development in small urban and rural communities is one of the more dramatic changes in socioeconomic trends in this century. Since other writers have suggested that the Interstate Highway System played a key role, this paper empirically examines the relationship between the location of freeways and migration and employment change between 1950 and 1975 in all nonmetropolitan counties in the United States by using both descriptive statistics and regression models. The results show that, while counties with freeways as a group have higher average growth rates, even after confounding factors such as proximity to metropolitan areas and presence of urban population concentrations are controlled, the presence of a limited access highway is far from an assurance of development for an individual county. Tourist services are the industry most closely associated with Interstates but, contrary to common conceptions, manufacturing and wholesaling are not clearly associated. The Interstate system was less able to explain the spatial pattern of development than nontransportation factors. Its role appears to have been to raise accessibility levels throughout the nonmetropolitan United States, which has benefited many communities, not just those adjacent to Interstates. (Author)