Over the past year, the Iowa DOT has worked to spiff up the interface for the iowadotmaps.com domain and the maps linked from there, including the individual county PDF maps. The images of each county and its towns, and their clickable-map areas, have become more advanced.
Last weekend or thereabouts, a change was implemented that affects pathnames and perhaps even the impression the maps give.
- This link style used to be the default (just insert the county name), but now gives 404 errors: http://www.iowadot.gov/maps/msp/pdf/tama.pdf
- This link style used to bring the color map, with colors corresponding to the the surface type of non-state-maintained roads (all gravel roads are red), but now also gives 404 errors: http://www.iowadot.gov/maps/msp/surf/muscatine.pdf
- Now, the default map — the one you get when you click on the county name at the top of each map page — is the colored surface map, with “-co” appended to the end (note also that someone with Web savvy has replaced the “%20” indicating a space in the filename with a hyphen): http://www.iowadot.gov/maps/msp/pdf/black-hawk-co.pdf
- If you want just the black-and-white, that now has a “-bwco” suffix. Just type in the county name — “ringgold”, “cerro-gordo”, etc. — and you’ll see the version that has steadily evolved since the early days of the Iowa Highway Commission.
Some pages still have “/surf/” for the color map linked at the side, but in general, clicking on either the county name at top once you’ve reached a county page or “Color map” on the right side will bring up a map with the third bullet’s pathname.
All the county maps have been updated to versions dated Jan. 1, 2014, with a notable Clarke County retcon that killed off IA 152 before it actually happened.
It’s not a huge change in the scheme of things, but one worth noting. If anything, the maps now really highlight how many miles of gravel road run in every county.