Interstate 65 (I-65) enters the US state of Kentucky from Tennessee, south of Franklin. It passes by the major cities of Bowling Green, Elizabethtown, and Louisville before exiting the state into Indiana.

Route description

Along its length in Kentucky, major attractions I-65 passes include the National Corvette Museum,

Mammoth Cave National Park Mammoth Cave National Park is an American national park in west-central Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper Sout ...

, Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, and

Fort Knox Fort Knox is a United States Army installation in Kentucky, south of Louisville and north of Elizabethtown. It is adjacent to the United States Bullion Depository, which is used to house a large portion of the United States' official gold res ...

before entering the state's largest metropolitan area, Louisville. It has interchanges with three of the state's parkways. The first of these is with the

Louie B. Nunn Cumberland Parkway The Louie B. Nunn Cumberland Parkway is a east–west controlled-access highway in the U.S. state of Kentucky, extending from Barren County in the west to Somerset in the east. It is one of seven named highways designated in Kentucky's park ...

north of Bowling Green between Smiths Grove and Park City. At Elizabethtown, it has two more parkway interchanges with the

Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway The Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway is a controlled-access highway running from Elizabethtown, Kentucky to near Nortonville, Kentucky. It intersects with Interstate 65 (I-65) at its eastern terminus, and I-69 at its western terminus. ...

and the Martha Layne Collins Bluegrass Parkway. I-65 also has interchanges with I-165 (formerly the

William H. Natcher Parkway The William H. Natcher Green River Parkway was the designation for a freeway that ran from Bowling Green to Owensboro in the US commonwealth of Kentucky. The Natcher Parkway was one of nine highways that were a part of Kentucky's parkway syste ...

) near Bowling Green, I-265, I-264, and a complex junction with I-64 and I-71 along the south bank of the

Ohio River The Ohio River is a long river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing southwesterly from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illino ...

in central Louisville. From there, northbound motorists on I-65 cross into Indiana on the Abraham Lincoln Bridge, while southbound I-65 traffic enters Kentucky from

Jeffersonville, Indiana Jeffersonville is a city and the county seat of Clark County, Indiana, Clark County, Indiana, United States, situated along the Ohio River. Locally, the city is often referred to by the abbreviated name Jeff. It lies directly across the Ohio River ...

, via the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge. The route is reportedly one of the heaviest traveled corridors in the US, with average daily traffic volumes of 50,000 to 70,000 vehicles. Most of the route has been widened to six lanes throughout the state. The widest stretch of I-65 in its entirety is in Louisville, at Kentucky Route 1065 (KY 1065, Outer Loop) where the mainline is 14 lanes wide, with seven lanes on each side. I-65 in Kentucky

The highway crosses the line between the Central Time Zone and Eastern Time Zone at the border of Hart and LaRue counties. For most of 2016, the Ohio River Bridges Project routed all I-65 traffic onto the Abraham Lincoln Bridge (a six-lane cable-stayed bridge now carrying only northbound traffic) while rebuilding the deck of the 1963 John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge to accommodate six lanes of all-southbound traffic. The project is also completing the rebuild of the Kennedy Interchange just south of both bridges in Downtown Louisville. On December 30, 2016, both I-65 bridges began using electronic toll collection (ETC) to charge motorists for their use of this previously toll-free Interstate crossing.

History

Kentucky Turnpike

From July 25, 1954, until June 30, 1975, the portion of I-65 from I-264 in Louisville to the Western Kentucky Parkway in Elizabethtown was a toll road bearing the Kentucky Turnpike name. It was signed with a distinctive sign featuring a

cardinal Cardinal or The Cardinal may refer to: Animals * Cardinal (bird) or Cardinalidae, a family of North and South American birds **''Cardinalis'', genus of cardinal in the family Cardinalidae **''Cardinalis cardinalis'', or northern cardinal, the ...

, the state bird of Kentucky. Unlike most states, Kentucky law requires that tolls be removed when the original construction bonds are paid off and cannot be extended. The road was thus the first of the state's extensive system of toll roads to be made free. Unlike the other roads, which maintain their separate names when becoming toll-free, the Kentucky Turnpike signs were removed with the tollbooths.

Original toll plazas and charges

The table below shows the original locations of the toll plazas and toll charges for consumer-sized, or class-one, vehicles.

Service areas

In addition to toll plazas, the Kentucky Turnpike also provided two service areas just south of Lebanon Junction and just north of Shepherdsville. They each provided a gas station and at least one fast food restaurant. They both closed May 31, 1984. The former service areas were located in the median between the northbound and southbound lanes, and, when the former Turnpike was reconstructed into Interstate Highway standards in the early 1980s, this necessitated the removal of left exit and entrance ramps from the primary travel lanes. Initially, the rebuilt highway was routed around the service areas: to the east of the Shepherdsville service area allowing only southbound access and to the west of the Lebanon Junction service area allowing only northbound access; however, this arrangement was incompatible with the existing contracts with concession operators at the service areas. These contracts specified that both service areas would be accessible to both northbound and southbound traffic. Faced with either the construction of expensive crossover ramps at both locations or buying out the concession contracts, the

Kentucky Transportation Cabinet The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) is Kentucky's state-funded agency charged with building and maintaining federal highways and Kentucky state highways, as well as regulating other transportation related issues. The Transportation Cabi ...

(KYTC) elected to buy out the concession contracts and close both service areas.

21st century

On November 15, 2006, the stretch of I-65 from Bowling Green to Louisville was renamed the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Highway. On February 12, 2007, a bill passed the

Kentucky Senate The Kentucky Senate is the upper house of the Kentucky General Assembly. The Kentucky Senate is composed of 38 members elected from single-member districts throughout the Commonwealth. There are no term limits for Kentucky Senators. The Kentu ...

to rename I-65 in Jefferson County the "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway". Signage was posted July 25, 2007. On July 15, 2007, Kentucky officially raised its speed limits on Interstate and state parkway highways to . Until that date, Kentucky was the only state along I-65's path that had a speed limit of . In 2008, Governor

Steve Beshear Steven Lynn Beshear (born September 21, 1944) is an American attorney and politician who served as the 61st governor of Kentucky from 2007 to 2015. He served in the Kentucky House of Representatives from 1974 to 1980, was the state's 44th atto ...

ordered the entire route to be widened to a minimum of six lanes through the entire state. This project won an award under the "Under Budget—Medium" category in the Southeast Regional competition of the 2014 America's Transportation Awards. The project was completed spring of 2019 with the final stretch between Sonora and Elizabethtown. In July 2017, the KYTC opened a new interchange of I-65 at milemarker 30 to provide access to the Kentucky Transpark near Bowling Green. The $66.8-million project, which began in 2016, would improve traffic conditions along I-65 and U.S. Route 31W (US 31W) in northeastern Warren County. The first phase of the project include the new interchange, exit 30, plus a four-lane connector road going from the Interstate to US 68 just east of Bowling Green. The second phase is building a two-lane connector road running from US 68 to US 31W between Bowling Green and Oakland, thus relieving congestion problems on both U.S. Routes. This was the first new exit on I-65 since 2002, when the interchange with KY 234 was built to connect downtown Bowling Green from the freeway.

Exit list

Auxiliary routes

*: A spur running from I-65 in Bowling Green to Owensboro. Formerly the

. *: Forms three-quarters of a beltway around the Louisville metropolitan area. The signage runs from I-65 to I-71 on the northeast side of the metro area. It is cosigned with KY 841 for its entire length and is known as the Gene Snyder Freeway. Construction of the Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Ohio River to connect the Kentucky segment of I-265 with the Indiana segment was completed and opened to traffic on December 18, 2016.

References

External links