Groonk's Newsmine 2.0

Fun fact... Memorial Parkway is the second busiest stretch of road in the state. Over 120,000 cars use it daily at its busiest point. The only road that has the Parkway beat is I-65 through downtown Birmingham, which handles somewhere around 150,000.

Another interesting fact about the decade it was built in. In 1950, Huntsville was "watercress capital of the world" in the "old" south. Population: 16,000

In 1960, it was Ground Four in the eyes of the Soviets for obvious reasons: Missile defense command, NASA, and other DoD operations.
Population: 75,000

Huntsville was probably the fastest growing city for its size in the entire country. It's population almost doubled again to 137,000 in 1970. This sudden growth threw the planners of the Eisenhower Interstate System offhand, as Decatur was the largest city in northern Alabama in 1950, thus the reason for the present routing of I-65. In fact, Huntsville was the largest city in the US (that wasn't the suburb of some larger city) without direct access to the interstate system until I-565 opened fully into the city. That was in October of 1992, IIRC.