Interstate 65 (I-65) enters the US state of

Kentucky Kentucky ( , ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States and one of the states of the Upper South. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to ...

from

Tennessee Tennessee ( , ), officially the State of Tennessee, is a landlocked state in the Southeastern region of the United States. Tennessee is the 36th-largest by area and the 15th-most populous of the 50 states. It is bordered by Kentucky to t ...

, south of

Franklin Franklin may refer to: People * Franklin (given name) * Franklin (surname) * Franklin (class), a member of a historical English social class Places Australia * Franklin, Tasmania, a township * Division of Franklin, federal electoral d ...

. It passes by the major cities of

Bowling Green A bowling green is a finely laid, close-mown and rolled stretch of turf for playing the game of bowls. Before 1830, when Edwin Beard Budding of Thrupp, near Stroud, UK, invented the lawnmower, lawns were often kept cropped by grazing sheep ...

, Elizabethtown, and

Louisville Louisville ( , , ) is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the 28th most-populous city in the United States. Louisville is the historical seat and, since 2003, the nominal seat of Jefferson County, on the Indiana border. ...

before exiting the state into

Indiana Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th st ...

Route description

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

National Corvette Museum The National Corvette Museum showcases the Chevrolet Corvette, an American sports car that has been in production since 1953. It is located in Bowling Green, Kentucky, off Interstate 65's Exit 28. It was constructed in 1994, and opened to the p ...

Mammoth Cave National Park Mammoth Cave National Park is an American national park in west-central Kentucky, encompassing portions of Mammoth Cave, the longest cave system known in the world. Since the 1972 unification of Mammoth Cave with the even-longer system under F ...

, 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 re ...

before entering the state's largest metropolitan area,

. It has interchanges with three of the state's parkways. The first of these is with the Louie B. Nunn Cumberland Parkway north of

between Smiths Grove and Park City. At Elizabethtown, it has two more parkway interchanges with the Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway and the

Martha Layne Collins Bluegrass Parkway The Martha Layne Collins Blue Grass Parkway is a controlled-access highway running from Elizabethtown, Kentucky to Woodford County, Kentucky, for a length of 71.134 miles (114.479 km). It intersects with Interstate 65 at its western t ...

. 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 sys ...

) near Bowling Green,

I-265 Interstate 265 (I-265) is a Interstate Highway partially encircling the Louisville metropolitan area. Starting from I-65 in the southern part of Louisville, it runs through Jefferson County, Kentucky, crosses the Ohio River on the Lewis ...

, I-264, and a complex junction with

I-64 Interstate 64 (I-64) is an east–west Interstate Highway in the Eastern United States. Its western terminus is at I-70, U.S. Route 40 (US 40), and US 61 in Wentzville, Missouri. Its eastern terminus is at an interchange ...

and

I-71 Interstate 71 (I-71) is a north–south Interstate Highway in the Great Lakes/Midwestern and Southeastern region of the United States. Its southern terminus is at an interchange with I-64 and I-65 (the Kennedy Interchange) in Louisville, ...

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 Illi ...

in central Louisville. From there, northbound motorists on I-65 cross into

on the

Abraham Lincoln Bridge The Abraham Lincoln Bridge is a six-lane, single-deck cable-stayed bridge carrying northbound Interstate 65 across the Ohio River, connecting Louisville, Kentucky, and Jeffersonville, Indiana. The main span is (two spans) and the bridge has a ...

, while southbound I-65 traffic enters Kentucky from

Jeffersonville, Indiana Jeffersonville is a city and the county seat of 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 to the north of Louis ...

, 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 The Eastern Time Zone (ET) is a time zone encompassing part or all of 23 states in the eastern part of the United States, parts of eastern Canada, the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico, Panama, Colombia, mainland Ecuador, Peru, and a small port ...

at the border of Hart and LaRue counties. For most of 2016, the

Ohio River Bridges Project The Ohio River Bridges Project was a transportation project in the Louisville metropolitan area involving the reconstruction of the Kennedy Interchange (locally known as " Spaghetti Junction"), the completion of two new Ohio River bridges, and t ...

routed all I-65 traffic onto the

(a six-lane

cable-stayed bridge A cable-stayed bridge has one or more ''towers'' (or ''pylons''), from which cables support the bridge deck. A distinctive feature are the cables or stays, which run directly from the tower to the deck, normally forming a fan-like pattern ...

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 Downtown Louisville is the largest central business district in the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the urban hub of the Louisville, Kentucky Metropolitan Area. Its boundaries are the Ohio River to the north, Hancock Street to the east, York and Jaco ...

. 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 A toll road, also known as a turnpike or tollway, is a public or private road (almost always a controlled-access highway in the present day) for which a fee (or '' toll'') is assessed for passage. It is a form of road pricing typically implemen ...

bearing the Kentucky Turnpike name. It was signed with a distinctive sign featuring a cardinal, 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

tollbooth A tollbooth (or toll booth) is an enclosure placed along a toll road that is used for the purpose of collecting a toll from passing traffic. A structure consisting of several tollbooths placed next to each other is called a toll plaza, tollgat ...

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 Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation throu ...

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 attor ...

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

Owensboro Owensboro is a home rule-class city in and the county seat of Daviess County, Kentucky, United States. It is the fourth-largest city in the state by population. Owensboro is located on U.S. Route 60 and Interstate 165 about southwest of Loui ...

. 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 Marion Eugene Snyder (January 26, 1928 – February 16, 2007) was an American politician elected as a Republican to the United States House of Representatives from two different districts in his native Kentucky. Background Snyder was born ...

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