Interstate Eighty and the Freight Spine of America

The road you are driving was not built here by accident. Interstate Eighty follows the Platte River Valley because the Platte Valley is the gentlest grade through the middle of the continent. The river gradient drops only a few feet per mile across Nebraska, a slope so gradual that oxen could manage it, that steam locomotives could manage it, and that now the largest trucks in American commerce manage it without strain. The land itself designed the route. Everything else, the wagon trails, the railroad, the highway, came after the geography made the argument.

Interstate Eighty was incorporated into the federal interstate system in nineteen fifty-six as part of the Eisenhower Interstate System. In Nebraska it runs roughly four hundred fifty-five miles from Omaha on the Missouri River to the Wyoming line near Kimball, following the same corridor the Union Pacific laid in the eighteen sixties, the same corridor where roughly four hundred thousand emigrants walked west in the decades before.

Today, Interstate Eighty through Nebraska is one of the busiest freight corridors in the United States. The trucks carry consumer goods from the Pacific ports in Los Angeles and Seattle to distribution centers in Chicago and beyond. Agricultural products from the Great Plains move in the opposite direction. At any given hour of any given day, thousands of semi-trucks are rolling this road in both directions.

The corridor's importance to logistics is such that analysts consider it one of the critical infrastructure chokepoints of the national economy. A multi-day closure, from ice storms which do happen here, or from a major accident at a critical interchange, creates disruptions that ripple through supply chains across the country within forty-eight hours.

The Platte Valley made this possible. The wagon ruts are buried under the asphalt, but the logic is the same.