Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project
The Louisville-Southern Indiana Ohio River Bridges Project increased cross-river mobility between Indiana and Kentucky by improving safety, alleviating traffic congestion and connecting highways. The project involved two states and a total investment of more than $2.3 billion.
Indiana and Kentucky partnered to build a new I-65 bridge with six northbound lanes, reconfigure Spaghetti Junction in downtown Louisville, reconfigure Indiana roadways and bridge approaches and rehab the Kennedy Bridge (I-65) with six southbound lanes. At the same time, the states built a new East End bridge eight miles upstream from downtown Louisville, extended the Snyder Freeway in Kentucky to the new bridge, and constructed a four-mile new-terrain highway in Indiana, extending the Lee Hamilton Highway (62/256) to the new bridge.
The project is stimulating the economy of one of the top 50 largest metro areas in the U.S. In the course of 30 years, the Ohio River Bridges Project is expected to generate an average of 15,556 new jobs a year, $29.5 billion in personal income and $86.7 billion in economic output for the region. Because of the amount of additional economic growth that is enabled in Indiana as a result of the project, significant increases in population and employment are anticipated with the associated increases in government revenue and a corresponding demand for government infrastructure and services.
By full build-out of the land use impact in 2030, all of the cost of county and local services needed to accommodate this growth is anticipated to be covered by tax revenue generated by project-related growth, leaving a local fiscal annual surplus of just over $7 million annually in 30 years.
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