September 26, 2016: Around Iowa, this is an unusual sight: A stoplight at the intersection of two county roads with nothing around. It’s at E34 (County Home Road) and W6E (Center Point Road) in Linn County.
Traditionally, the state of Iowa and municipalities stay away from putting stoplights on rural roads. (It’s part of what the US 65/IA 330 kerfuffle is about.) But, in the semi-recent past, the southeast corner of the E34/W6E intersection was incorporated into the suburb of Robins, making it less rural. Per Google Maps Street View, the stoplight was put up between mid-2009 and early 2012; a church to the south that opened in 2011 with a biiiig parking lot may have been a factor in the intersection upgrade as well. A gas station at the I-380 E34 exit, the first building at the interchange, is less than a year old.
You can see Robins’ very janky north city limits on the PDF map here. (Note also that much of the west city limits cling to the right-of-way on I-380 except for that one spot.) While the core of Robins is 2½ to 3 miles southeast of this corner, the city is boxed in on the south, making sprawl in this direction inevitable. A special census completed this year pushed it above Tipton and Rock Valley in population.