Don’t whine. Yes, of course, people are important.

We do not disqualify the sad stories of degraded people all over this earth. But if we valued the land and its role in human affairs, perhaps we would have fewer sad stories.

And no, this column is not sponsored by the Indiana Farm Bureau. This column is primarily a tribute to the Kokomo Bypass and the recently completed Interstate 69 route from Indianapolis to Evansville.

If you’ve traveled the Kokomo Bypass (US 31), you know there’s no commercial or new residential activity at the interchanges. No boring warehouses line the path east of the famous, former Kokomo parade of traffic lights that once served as a bypass.

There’s also little new along the “new” I-69. It’s essentially an upgrade of the four-lane Indiana 37, from Interstate 465 and Harding Street in Indianapolis south through Martinsville to a point southwest of Bloomington.

The tragedy of past highway construction was the excessive “development” or degradation of adjacent land. We too easily forget that the purpose of superhighways is not to make adjacent landowners rich, but to help move goods and people between existing places.

We have to make choices about where we build highways. The interstate system was designed to connect cities, not destroy them.

Of all the major cities, only Indianapolis has two major freeways from all four directions into the city center.

This pattern is followed in other states. St. Louis and Chicago, Louisville and Cincinnati. Cleveland and Detroit, Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, are interstate junctions.

Each of these metropolitan centers has struggled to restore their downtowns to regional dominance. Circumferential highways (I-465 around Indianapolis) have pulled commercial and residential activity away from the hub and spoke urban patterns of the past.

In smaller cities, such as Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, Columbus (Indiana), South Bend, Elkhart, Michigan City, Bloomington, Anderson and Richmond, the freeways avoided the city center and attracted development as economic magnets.

Today we see the highways filled with offices, apartment complexes, warehouses, hospitals and shopping malls competing for the open spaces between the interchanges.

The worst of these are residential buildings where residents are exposed to elevated levels of pollution and noise. When local zoning laws allow these inappropriate developments, we see greed combined with indifference.

Current users of I-69 between Bloomington and Evansville, as well as some travelers on the new Kokomo Bypass, complain about the lack of gas stations at the interchanges. Most of these complaints come from people who suffer from bladder problems—not the need to fill up, but to “empty the tank.”

But the absence of extraneous, intrusive ‘development’ should be welcomed as evidence of progress coupled with conservation.

Morton Marcus is an economist. You can reach him by email at [email protected].

This article originally appeared on the Evansville Courier & Press: Marcus: Land use is our most critical decision