The ghost of IA 402

Added to the DOT’s five-year plan last year, for work this year, is a resurfacing project for IA 21 from IA 8 to US 20. It’s your typical hot-mix asphalt, flaggers ahead, etc., but the December letting packet had a special surprise — a reminder that once upon a time this was going to be Waterloo’s superhighway.

The secret history of IA 402 was my first deep dive for this website, looking heavily into newspaper articles of the time. Much, much later, when the construction documents from 1968 were posted online, I saw that the plans had gone so far as to include the centerline for the never-built southbound lanes. Now, the 1968 plan has been included with the resurfacing project as a reference, but with “Future Improvement” lined out (above) (the file is 39 MB for who knows why).

The two-lane segment was contracted out as 402, but it would not be signed that way. It opened in the summer of 1969 as an extension of IA 21. Waterloo would have to wait more than 15 years to get a freeway connection to the national system. In fact, the time the complete I-380 has existed isn’t much longer than the time Waterloo waited between being told a superhighway was coming and its arrival.

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