Peak Oil Task Force Report - City of Bloomington - State of Indiana

REVIEW OF THE CURRENT SITUATION: PAVING THE WAY
Road Infrastructure and its Influence on
Development
The growth of an expansive road network has
had a transformative effect on Bloomington’s
built environment for the past two decades. An
aphorism attributed to industrial designer
Norman Bel Geddes, who designed General
Motor’s Futurama exhibit for the 1931 World’s
Fair, stated “the highway should not impress
upon the city, nor should the city impress
upon the highway.” The traditional practice of running connecting pikes and roads through
the centers of the communities they connected was deemed to be no longer appropriate
because most highway traffic would not be expected to be destined for the communities
through which the highway ran. It was expected to be bypass traffic which, if routed
through the community, would only add to congestion and not commerce. Therefore, it
was thought best to allow it to pass by communities rather than through them.
Bloomington was not immune from this bypass logic. State Road 37 used to come through
Bloomington by way of Cascades Park. The park was a Depression‐era project of
considerable civic utility. Community leaders at the time believed that the experience of
entering (or leaving) Bloomington would be greatly enhanced if the road wound through a
park – as it still does. However, by the 1960s Bel Geddes’ sentiment had deeply pervaded
the highway engineering mindset and, when calls were made to help deal with the
“congestion” on State Road 37, it was natural to look at bypassing the city as one part of a
comprehensive solution. By the early 1970s the road had been divided, four‐laned, and
now took a route not through the city, but far off to its west side, through an almost entirely
rural landscape.
Report of the Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force
The SR 37/SR 46 “Exchange” constructed in anticipation of building a
new terrain highway through much of Southern Indiana’s farmland and
greenspace in the interest of increased commodity transport by truck.
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