No one knows just how many factories or McDonald's restaurants or software firms Interstate 73 could bring to Southwest Virginia and the Roanoke Valley.
Interstates have the potential to bring new jobs and new businesses to the regions they run through.
But no one is required to study the economic impact of the proposed road and its multiple corridors, and so hard numbers are lacking. None of those early corridors precisely parallel the routes under consideration today. From there, it followed U.S. 220 to the North Carolina border. The figures were inexact, and the study didn't attempt to identify the specific business sectors that would benefit from the road or what kinds of jobs would be created. VDOT isn't required to conduct further economic impact studies.