Main Street no more

This network of truck stops and local businesses is spread across America’s highways for a reason—given road conditions, weather, traffic, and the irregularity of route schedules, truckers can’t exactly plan where they stop. Truck stops and travel plazas along interstate highways represent 2.2 million jobs and 97,000 businesses in the US, according to NATSO, a national truck stop advocacy group. And that’s only along the interstates. Many truckers will eschew homogenous highway truck stops for local businesses, even keeping their favorite haunts closely-guarded secrets, according to three truckers who spoke to Quartz.

Back in Milton, the Parkview Cafe, a small diner, was one of those favored spots by truckers. You’ve been to the Parkview Cafe—at least in spirit. Strong coffee is poured into off-white ceramic mugs, while patrons sit in vinyl-upholstered booths clinking forks and scooping up eggs.

Natalie Ashiku, owner of the Parkview Cafe, drops food off at tables, hustling from behind the diner’s counter. Her son, Kushtin, also runs food, and tallies up checks from around the restaurant.

Natalie Ashiku and her son Kushtin in the Parkview Cafe. (Quartz/Dave Gershgorn)

“We don’t get any people with trucks, they’re gone,” Ashiku says. “It’s just bad engineering,” she added about the bypass, “there’s a hell of a lot of better places they could’ve spent their money.”

At the cafe’s counter, Dave Kress, a retired trucker who settled down in Milton, says finding the little mom-and-pop restaurants made trucking worthwhile, at least some of the time.

“I don’t miss driving, but I do miss that,” he said. “That’s why you see a lot of fat truckers.”

Milton is far from the only town that’s suffered after traffic has been diverted to larger routes. Route 66, arguably America’s most famous highway and a pioneer for the idea of a highway that could connect one side of the country to another, is the most stark example of what can happen to local businesses when traffic no longer flows.

“Route 66 was literally a Main Street for countless communities along its 2,400-mile length. The advent of the interstate turned many a Route 66 downtown to a near ghost town,” researchers from Rutgers wrote in a 2012 report.



The report focused on the highway’s economic pivot to tourism. Once the connector of America’s heartland to the west coast, Route 66 is now littered with abandoned gas stations, restaurants and ghost towns. Rusted-out cars punctuate the landscape, desolate but for tourist sites and photo opportunities. Twenty-five towns with the most iconic Route 66 attractions were reported to have 20% of the population living below the national poverty line, compared to the national rate of 13.5%, according to the Rutgers study.

No attractions for miles. (Quartz/Dave Gershgorn)

VanDevender grew up in Albuquerque, close to where Route 66 once ran by the city, and says he’s visited hundreds of sites on the old highway.

“You had a lot of truckers, you had a lot of economic value pouring through that pipeline, and a lot of towns put down nearby to capitalize on that activity,” he said. But when highways like I-40, which superseded the path of much of Route 66, were built as a part of the interstate system, those towns became inconvenient for those traveling the larger highways at much faster speeds.

VanDevender predicts autonomous vehicles will force more people toward cities, and urban areas will compound, a consequence of less economic stimulation in the “between” places. The term “flyover states” may soon have to be amended to “drive-by states.”

For Shaikh, it’s too late to cushion the blow of losing truck traffic. After selling the Milton Travel Center, he was out of work for two years. One of Shaikh’s cousins suggested starting a Pakistani restaurant, so he funded the endeavor and the two co-opened the restaurant. But due to familial strife the cousin bailed, transferring ownership back over to Shaikh, who is now responsible for a business he didn’t truly intend to start. In what little free time he has, Shaikh is suing the Wisconsin Department of Transportation for what he says is governmental negligence, after he claims the department failed to study and clearly explain what would happen to his business. Although a court recently ruled against him, Shaikh plans to appeal the decision to a higher court.

The truckers aren’t giving up, either. Standing in the shadow of the massive, human-controllable Peterbilt truck at the Iowa 80 truck stop, Terry waxes poetic about the outcome of humans and robots travelling America’s highways together.

“Get the body bags out.”