Letter: Mid-States Corridor: A closer look at claims and consequences
A response to “Answering some questions about the Mid-States Corridor”
I respect anyone willing to put their name on an argument. When a project carries a price tag in the billions, the standard for “honest, truthful, and non-biased” information must be equally high. In a recent letter to the Dubois County Free Press, Dubois Strong executive director Colten Pipinger defended the Mid-States Corridor (MSC), touting the $1 billion project as “vitally beneficial.” He leans on computer models and praises reduced-conflict intersections (RCIs), describing the project as a natural next step for our system of roads.
Travel Time and Local Traffic
Mr. Pipinger is quite candid about one point: “The economic benefit…is not a massive time savings from the South side of Huntingburg to the Jasper Walmart.” That much is true. What he does not emphasize is that INDOT’s own figures show the savings are minimal even for long-distance trips. The official Screening of Alternatives report indicates that for a trip starting in downtown Jasper, the Mid-States Corridor could save one minute to Louisville and three minutes to Indianapolis.
These savings are primarily achieved on the segment between Jasper and Haysville. Instead of presenting these straightforward numbers, though, proponents often cite a much larger “total minutes saved” figure across several destinations. This total is reached by repeatedly counting the same few minutes. For example, if the corridor saves three minutes on the common segment between Jasper and Bloomington, that same three-minute savings is then counted multiple times for every trip that continues to Indianapolis, Chicago, or beyond.
INDOT itself quietly acknowledges this method is problematic. In discussing the “minutes saved” performance measure, the Screening of Alternatives notes that since many trips share a common path, some people may view this method as “double-counting.” Agreed. This is why many people leave public meetings thinking the travel-time benefits are dramatic when INDOT’s own numbers show they are very small.
Furthermore, INDOT has not provided a public analysis showing that traffic on US-231 through Jasper and Huntingburg will improve significantly if the bypass is built. The project is designed first and foremost to move regional traffic around our towns, not to solve existing congestion on 231.
In short, the project delivers minimal time savings for long-distance trips, but it will result in large, daily time losses for many local residents.
At several east-west crossings where RCIs (J-turns/U-turns) are planned, local travel may actually become slower and more complicated. Using INDOT’s own traffic counts and our field timing (performed without any traffic) on a similar J-turn near Dale, we can project the impact: one single J-turn on State Road 164 will add around 40,000 hours of delay each year for everyday drivers. When thousands of vehicles are forced through a longer, more complex maneuver, the lost time adds up quickly. That tradeoff is not spelled out in the project’s sales pitch, but it should be.
The Real Price of Mid-States
Mr. Pipinger writes, “The project cost to build the Mid-States Corridor is right around $1B.” He dismisses higher figures, but he does not explain that this $1.08 billion estimate, found in INDOT’s documentation, is for the 23-mile section in Dubois County alone. That works out to roughly $47 million per mile. If the remaining miles of the 54-mile route cost anything similar, the total price easily climbs into the $2.5 billion range, before land acquisition, potential lawsuits, and the inflation and overruns that routinely affect projects of this scale.
Indiana’s own I-69 extension is a grave warning about taking early estimates at face value. That project was marketed around 2003 for about $1.7 billion, but today, news reports and State officials put the total cost at roughly $4 billion for 142 miles. Even after those massive overruns, the final average per-mile cost of I-69 sits at roughly $30 million. In short, the MSC’s starting estimate is substantially higher than I-69’s final per-mile cost, yet the MSC is not built to interstate standards, relies heavily on cheaper J-turns instead of full interchanges, and delivers only minimal time savings. The MSC would cost more per mile and be a worse road.
The proponent’s comparison of the MSC to relatively modest community projects like the Thyen-Clark Cultural Center misses the point entirely. The cost, the complexity, and the permanence of the MSC put it in an entirely different league. When the price of getting it wrong is measured in billions and generations, the margin for error is small and the need for caution is great.
Mr. Pipinger points out that about 80% of the funding would come from the federal government, emphasizing that those dollars “will be spent somewhere.” That is true, but federal money is not free money. It is still taxpayer money, and the state and local shares will not appear out of thin air. They come from the same limited pool we all rely on to repair existing roads and bridges, expand utilities, improve broadband, support housing, and meet workforce and emergency-service needs. Every dollar tied up in this highway is a dollar that can’t be used for the essential local projects we already know we need.
Who Ends Up Holding the Bag for US-231?
Regarding the State’s desire to relinquish US-231, Mr. Pipinger argues, “Local control means local decisions,” and he notes that many people already complain about 231’s condition. Fair. He then claims Dubois County “can take care of our road for about 80% less than INDOT can” or for “about $0.20 on the dollar.” That claim deserves a hard look.
Maintaining a major highway like 231 is not just about occasional resurfacing. It includes culverts and drainage, stormwater systems, bridges, guardrails, curbs and gutters, snow and ice removal, striping, traffic signals, lighting, and more. INDOT manages this work with dedicated crews, specialized equipment, statewide economies of scale, and federal support. Our cities and county do not have all of those advantages.
It is one thing to say that local control could lead to more responsive decisions about, say, altering a traffic light. It is unreasonable to suggest that we can suddenly assume responsibility for one of the most complex and expensive roads in the county at 20% of INDOT’s cost, without federal assistance or any clear long-term funding plan, and improve the road at the same time, despite its current condition. For Mr. Pipinger to cite a specific, guaranteed savings of 80% when local experts have not yet produced a single realistic estimate suggests he is speaking from rhetoric, not financial reality. The facts are so murky that local governments have already hired consultants to estimate the true maintenance costs, proving no one currently knows if it is feasible. That is a huge red flag that threatens local taxpayers with a massive financial burden.
A far better use of local funding would be to make targeted investments that directly support local growth and quality of life. This means fixing dangerous intersections, reducing traffic on 231, and keeping our existing infrastructure well-maintained—the roads we already rely on and will continue to use regardless of the MSC. These kinds of tangible, scaled projects directly benefit local employers, make daily commutes safer, and represent a responsible, pro-growth strategy for Dubois County.
What Kokomo Really Tells Us
To reassure those worried about bypasses hurting small towns, Mr. Pipinger says Dubois Strong looked at Kokomo and found that median incomes increased while poverty and unemployment decreased after bypass construction.
However, Kokomo is very different from Dubois County. Kokomo sits near Indianapolis between major north–south routes and has been home to heavy manufacturing, mostly notably automotive, for generations. Over 60,000 people live in Kokomo, nearly 40% more than Dubois County’s entire population. Crucially, by basic measures of household income and poverty, Kokomo is significantly worse off than we are:
Dubois County
- Poverty Rate: 9.5%
- Median Household Income: $75,000
Kokomo
- Poverty Rate: 15.4%
- Median Household Income: $54,000
It’s great that things have improved in Kokomo relative to its own difficult past. But holding it up as a poster child ignores the fact that Dubois County still outperforms Kokomo on nearly every measure of economic well-being, even though Kokomo has a bypass, major industry, and a larger population. The moral of the Kokomo story is that highways are not a guarantee of prosperity.
Safety, J-Turns, and What Was Not Studied
On safety, Mr. Pipinger says the “short answer” is that RCIs (J-Turns/U-Turns) are safe and dismisses the extra time for east–west drivers as “nominal.” He offers J-turns as a safer alternative to trying to cross a four-lane highway by driving straight across it. This is misleading. If safety were truly the primary goal, we would expect to see a commitment to the safest possible design: a limited access expressway with full, grade-separated interchanges (on-ramps), which remove crossing conflicts altogether. Instead, the project leans heavily on J-turns because they are a fraction of the cost for an already expensive project.
Furthermore, the safest option is not to create the intersection in the first place. We are taking safe, free-flowing traffic and introducing a brand-new conflict point where none currently exists.
While J-Turns are not inherently unsafe, this approach calls into question the claim that this corridor will improve overall safety for our communities.
Even more troubling is Mr. Pipinger’s concession that “there is no good way to assess the total impact of emergency services.” He provides no evidence of how ambulance and fire response times will change across the network. Nor does he discuss how school bus routes will be affected when local roads are rerouted or severed.
INDOT’s own Community Impacts materials say response times “may be affected,” but they do not quantify where, by how much, or in which direction. If their tools are sophisticated enough to forecast economic conditions in 2050, they are surely capable of estimating emergency response and school bus delays. The public deserves this answer, and local governments should be demanding it for every possible alternative.
TREDIS and “Conservative” Numbers
A large part of the proponent’s case rests on the TREDIS economic model, which Mr. Pipinger touts as “the most widely used tool in North America.” He says that its projections are “often conservative estimates,” citing I-69 as proof that actual time savings exceeded predictions, and concludes the MSC will therefore “under-promise and over-deliver.”
Mr. Pipinger never explains what TREDIS is: a scenario-testing tool. It generates “if this, then that” stories by taking economic baselines, traffic forecasts, and crucial user-supplied assumptions about markets, growth, and business attraction. It does not generate conservative truths about the future. If the assumptions supplied to the model are optimistic (say, about future traffic levels or business attraction) then the outputs will be equally optimistic. Touting TREDIS outputs as conservative is misleading. The results are only as conservative as what people feed into the model.
Who Pays and Who Benefits
Mr. Pipinger frames the funding structure as an opportunity: 80% federal dollars, 10% local, some private funding, and a suggestion that taxes “do not necessarily” have to increase. This framing leaves out who really bears the long-term burden and who truly benefits. The highway would be built primarily for freight that will not stop here, shop here, or hire here. Yet the long-term costs, including maintenance and massive opportunity costs, will fall on local residents and local businesses.
Local governments will suffer the opportunity cost of having tied up so many dollars in one project that there is far less left to deal with the ordinary but essential work of running a community. Local residents, on the other hand, will live with the land loss, the noise, the J-turn delays, the changes in emergency response patterns, and the long-term obligation to maintain a very expensive road.
There is also a fundamental contradiction in the economic story being told. Dubois Strong’s own 2023 housing study shows that Jasper will need roughly 110 new homes each year, about 1,300 by 2035, simply to meet existing demand. Countywide rental occupancy is already near full. In other words, a major limiting factor for growth in Dubois County is housing supply. Creating new neighborhoods and development sites requires utilities, sewer extensions, water capacity, access roads, and other local infrastructure. Those are exactly the kinds of investments that become harder to make if public dollars and attention are tied up in a multi-billion-dollar corridor. The more we commit to the MSC, the less financial and infrastructure capacity we have to build the housing our own studies say we urgently need so our young people can afford to put down roots.
There is nothing wrong with a handful of businesses advocating for a project they believe will benefit them, but when those projects are funded with public money, the public deserves a clear accounting of costs, risks, and trade-offs, not just promises and best-case scenarios.
A Better Direction for Dubois County
The Mid-States Corridor is not progress. It is a costly diversion from work that would genuinely strengthen Dubois County: improving the roads we already use, investing in housing and workforce needs, supporting the employers who are here now, and attracting new business. The price of a mistake on this scale would be measured not just in dollars, but in decades of obligations and a permanent reshaping of our landscape.
We have better options. We can choose investments that deliver clear, measurable benefits instead of speculative projections. We can direct resources toward projects that residents will feel every day, not toward a bypass built primarily for traffic that will pass us by. Dubois County deserves decisions grounded in evidence, accountability, and long-term value. The Mid-States Corridor does not meet that standard.
Brad Hochgesang
Jasper
