Along its length in Kentucky, I-65 passes Mammoth Cave National Park, Bernheim Forest, the National Corvette Museum and the Fort Knox Military Reservation 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 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 and the Martha Layne Collins Bluegrass Parkway. I-65 also has interchanges with I-165 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 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 via the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge. The route is reportedly one of the heaviest traveled corridors in the United States, 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 where the mainline is 14 lanes wide. in Bowling Green, Kentucky, with Clearview font signage in 2007. 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 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 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 WK Parkway in Elizabethtown was a toll road 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. 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. It is today almost impossible to find any traces of its former toll status.
Original toll plazas and charges
The table below shows the original locations of the toll plazas, and toll charges for consumer-sized, or class 1 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 when the turnpike was absorbed into the Interstate 65 corridor in June 1975, thus making the service area on the Wendell H. Ford Western Kentucky Parkway the last remaining service areas on the toll road system, and still remained open even after the WK Parkway became toll-free in 1987, which is 27 years after the Kentucky Turnpike did so.
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 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 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 10 mile stretch between Sonora and Elizabethtown. In July 2017, the KYTC opened a new interchange of I-65 at mile marker 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. 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 U.S. 68 just east of Bowling Green. The second phase is building a two-lane connector road running from U.S. 68 to U.S. 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 William H. Natcher Parkway.
: Forms three-quarters of a beltway around Metro Louisville. The signage runs from I-65 to I-71 on the northeast side of the Metro. 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.
