Ohio chokes on car and truck traffic and its pollution, din and mayhem. As it is, Columbus has long needed what’d be an Outer-Outerbelt; the original (I-270) is a death trap when it isn’t a parking lot.
Then there’s Ohio’s fundamentally stupid decision to spurn high-speed intercity passenger rail lines. Politicians may claim otherwise; they’ve “studied it,” haven’t they? But that just means “forget-about-it.”
The United States can loft men and women into space, but Ohio can’t run a Dayton-Columbus train so Ohioans can escape what seems like the death-a-day strip of I-70 linking Montgomery and Franklin counties.
As you’d expect, in a state with few new ideas, but lots of shiny wrapping paper, Ohio’s already looked over the Toledo-Myrtle Beach brainstorm during the 1991-98 administration of Republican Gov. George V. Voinovich.
Result: A public relations stunt suggesting that the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission might fund and build I-73’s Toledo-to-Portsmouth segment. The turnpike spent $5.5 million on a 1995 feasibility study. Result: Nada.
There are common-sense highway improvements that could make real economic sense. Possibility: Extend Akron-to-Youngstown’s I-76 (which now ends near Medina County’s Westfield Center, at I-71’s Exit 209) all the way directly west to Indiana, via Willard, Tiffin, Findlay and Van Wert.
The state should demolish Cleveland’s Memorial Shoreway, thanks to whining from east-of-Cleveland residents who can’t get to Cedar Point fast enough. (That said, you need to wonder if Cedar Point, given this season’s... challenges ... will keep its long-time allure.) The shoreway and flanking freight-railway lines wall off Ohioans from Lake Erie.
One possibly good reason to build something called I-73: Ohio does really need an Interstate-standard road to really open up Appalachian Ohio. Proposed I-73, by following current routes, wouldn’t. And Cleveland-to-Marietta I-77 and Columbus-to-Wheeling I-70 don’t.
One option: Rebuilding – widening, straightening (and ramping all of) – U.S. 62 from Canton to Columbus, and finishing, after years of stalling, U.S. 62’s Alliance-to-Youngstown re-route.
Ohio needs to keep residents, not hemorrhage them; make home-to-work and home-to-school drives safer; and kick out the jams in Central Ohio. An I-73 would only further bloat traffic and, combined with the General Assembly’s 19th-century politics, would nudge even more Ohioans to leave their state. That’d be an investment in the past, not the future.
Correction:
Last week’s column misspelled the first name of Vivek Ramaswamy, age 40, of Upper Arlington. (His home’s appraised value: Roughly $2.4 million.) Ramaswamy will almost certainly win Republicans’ 2026 gubernatorial nomination to succeed term-limited GOP Gov. Mike DeWine, of Cedarville.
Cincinnati-born Ramaswamy, son of parents from India, was valedictorian of his class at Cincinnati’s Jesuit-run St. Xavier High School – 20% of whose students “[include members of] other Christian denominations and the Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic faiths.”
Ramaswamy, an American success story, earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard and a Yale law degree. He’s a self-made billionaire and for a time sought 2024’s GOP presidential nomination. As noted, Republicans will likely slate Ramaswamy to face Democrats’ probable nominee to become Ohio’s next governor, Dr. Amy Acton, M.D., age 59, of Bexley, once a member of DeWine’s Cabinet as state Health director.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him at tsuddes@gmail.com.
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