Eastern Kentucky has lost population and jobs in recent decades, and Pike County is no exception. But U.S. 23, also called Corridor B, has helped Pikeville buck the trend.
A recent report from the Appalachian Regional Commission says the highway is now critical to the region’s success.
Pikeville is home to a major medical center, a growing university and a tourism-focused economy. According to Dan Hodge of Cambridge Econometrics, one of the report’s authors, more people now commute to Pikeville than live there.
“The four-lane highway really makes commuting feasible for a lot of people in this area,” Hodge said of Pikeville Tuesday in a Zoom presentation.
Hodge says more than 10,000 individuals commute each day to the city of 7,500 residents.
U.S. 23 was improved as part of the Appalachian Development Highway System, created in 1965.
“So it's not a very big city in terms of population,” he said. “But you can see it's got over 10,000 people every day commuting in to work there. Only 1,400 leaving.”
The Pikeville Medical Center alone employs 3,400 people, and the University of Pikeville has 2,000 students.
Corridor B also has allowed the region to attract more manufacturing and tourism. U.S. 23 is known as the Country Music Highway because of the number of singers who grew up near it, including Kentucky’s Loretta Lynn.
In contrast to emerging industry, Pike County only had about 300 coal jobs left at the end of June, according to the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. Roughly 300 more coal workers were laid off earlier this year when a Pikeville operator filed for bankruptcy. Its assets were sold at auction for a fraction of the company’s debt.
For decades, Pike County was the state’s leading coal producer, but for the past few years, other Eastern Kentucky areas have surpassed it.
The Appalachian Development Highway System was created by Congress as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
In the decades since, the system has built about 3,000 miles of improved highways. With 414 completed miles, Kentucky has more of those roads than any other state.
West Virginia and Pennsylvania each have more than 300 miles, while Tennessee has about 300.
Some of the Appalachian corridors are interstate highways, like I-86 in New York or I-22 in Alabama. The southern part of Corridor B, from Kingsport, Tennessee, to Asheville, North Carolina, is designated as I-26.
