The plans for changing IA 17 east of Boone are available. The meeting is Thursday at United school. The final decision was the “Red plan” from a set of proposals three years ago.
According to the maps, IA 17 will continue straight north for an additional mile from where it meets E41 today, then go east on 200th Street. There will be a bridge for 17 across E41 and the railroad tracks with a arcing connector. In addition, 200th Street will be paved west from new 17 to the Boone city limits.
This marks the end of a state intersection that has been around since at least 1930. Its exact history before that, though, is murky. I know that the Lincoln Highway did not parallel the railroad on the south side for a 2-mile segment between R Avenue and T Avenue; instead, it crossed the railroad and used 205th Street, then continued east to Ames via 210th Street. I don’t know if that was changed in the 1920s, because it would have involved building a new road for the end result of moving the place where the highway crossed the railroad.
The new 17’s east-west mile will be half a mile north of that original segment, and thus the known Lincoln Highway segment between 205th Street and the Jordan elevator will drop from the state rolls.
Notably, this plan does not make any special accommodations for the farm field on the southeast corner of the 17/E41 intersection, which is used as the parking lot for the Farm Progress Show/Central Iowa Expo grounds.