I will have been on a variety of eastern roads when you read this, and may or may not have an opinion. It is also possible I will fly down to Houston and have a private adventure driving one of the cars up to NH as they are moving here. Fortunately, they will be flying the cats, so they didn't even ask me to do that.
I-92 was proposed, but never built. There were (and I suppose, are) several proposed routes from somewhere in NY to somewhere in ME which cut across NH and VT. The expectation was that it would be a spur to prosperity, especially to the interior of ME, but somehow the numbers never worked out. I recall hearing years ago that VT increasingly objected, ostensibly for environmental but actually for aesthetic reasons, and this was what had driven the final nails in the idea.
Yet still, if you look at a map of the Northeast, it just makes sense.
I thought the suggestion that the old Yankee joke "you can't get there from here" is based on the absence of E-W routes was silly at first, but on reflection, it might be so. The whole site at the link is not that interesting, but I just like looking at those three corridors and wondering about them. What do you think? Does a trucking route make sense?
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Interstates tended to follow established travel routes, and before that the federal highways often followed rail routes, which usually followed easy grades or previously established trails. Looking at the existing rail network there doesn't seem to be any reason for long distance freight transport east-west from the interior of Maine across New Hampshire to Vermont. I'm guessing the terrain in western Maine into New Hampshire is mostly north-south valleys which would make a cross-drainage route impractical. There is an east-west routing for northern Maine in southern Quebec through northern Maine following the St Lawrence, and the other major route from central Maine goes south to the Atlantic coast and then east-west through Massachusetts. If you can't get there from here now it's probably pretty likely that there never was a way for anybody to get there from here, at least over the route that you'd like to use.
My son recently moved about 30 minutes northeast of the Columbus OH metro, and we had a brief discussion on a similar topic Sunday. He noted in that part of eastern Ohio there's a huge gap between I-70 and I-80/90 with no major east-west routes. I think the reason is probably pretty similar to the Maine/New Hampshire situation. It is much easier to north or south to the flat and low-cost routes using the Ohio River and Lake Erie, even though it's a longer trip overall, that nobody developed direct east-west routes into Columbus.
Around here, it's the mountains and gorges that limit potential routes. When Helene knocked out I-40 for six months, any trucker wanting to move goods from Western North Carolina to Eastern Tennessee had to travel hundreds of miles out of the way -- to the perimeter of Atlanta going south then back through Chattanooga, or to Virginia and then back southwest from Bristol to Knoxville if going north. There aren't other roads through these rocks that a big truck can safely pass.
Even now, with I-40 partially open in both directions, wide and extended loads have to go the other ways.
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