July 6, 2013: Clarence is the only town between Missouri Valley and besides Clinton in eastern Iowa where US 30 still runs through its heart. How long will that remain the case?
Upgrading US 30 to four lanes between Lisbon and De Witt is a project that doesn’t have much in the way of similar things in Iowa highway construction.
For many other projects, relocation was a theoretically simpler affair. US 20 between Waterloo and Dubuque? Move the whole thing a mile and a half south. IA 60? Stay on the east side of the railroad and have square-ish bypasses where necessary. US 218? Fewer towns and water features. The best parallels might be US 151 and IA 163, with their non-straight routes, but even those are imperfect. Often, the where was easier settled than the how (and especially the when).
Now, in an update from the April meeting, documents released June 19 give a clearer picture of where bypasses might be, and it’s kind of a mess. We have a whole bunch of small communities that don’t cleanly stick to one side or the other, plus a parallel railroad that swaps sides, plus a water feature (Yankee Run) that closely parallels a sizable segment and a big ol’ spot of wetlands in the Wapsipinicon River area.
Either US 30 stays on the present alignment or goes a bit south of Mechanicsville, Stanwood, and Clarence, that’s pretty evident. Past there, far-north and far-south options have been sketched out. The former would miss the present road and railroad by a mile. The latter would, ironically, come back near or even on portions of the Lincoln Highway/pre-1956 alignment but destroy much of the structural integrity of that route. (What I mean is, trying to follow what’s left of the LH would be a nightmare. I need a better term for this.)
This won’t get past the “commencing to proceed to get started” stage for a while, but the revised study area gives more detail on where to look.
UPDATE 3/3/21: Never too late to fix a grievous error, right? D’oh. Sorry, Carroll, Denison, and Logan.