July 6, 2013: The Lincoln Highway departs from present-day US 30 right at the Linn-Cedar county line. After the bypass is built, this intersection will still be here, but the road won’t be US 30.
Maps and documents for the US 30 Mount Vernon-Lisbon bypass were posted online after the public meeting earlier this month. On the fourth PDF, you can see that the east end of the bypass, which will extend into Cedar County, briefly runs four new lanes north of existing US 30 until coming back to the present two-lane near Charles Avenue.
Of the 2¾ miles of the Lincoln Highway that currently overlap 30 here — from the Linn-Cedar line, shown above, to where a gravel road crosses the railroad tracks before entering Mechanicsville — only about a mile will remain part of 30. The rest will be broken into two segments.
How will the Lincoln Highway Scenic Byway be signed after this happens? The fork will still exist, but it won’t be part of 30 anymore. Going west to east, from present 30, it will probably go south on Adams Avenue on an overpass, then east on a frontage road (labeled “Kirkwood 3” but probably a future 123rd or 125th Street), briefly use a left-behind piece of current 30, then get back on a frontage road (“Kirkwood 4”) to Charles Avenue where it will hook up with 30 just past the end of the four-lane. Existing 30 east of Adams Avenue will dead-end.
After seeing the bypass maps, this question arises: If present Adams Avenue will still exist, with an overpass over the bypass, the new diagonal road that will serve the Lisbon interchange can’t also be Adams Avenue, can it? Otherwise we’ll have the intersection of Adams and Adams. Since that will be the new gateway to Lisbon, perhaps the city and counties should confer on what to name that.