Things I noticed about the October 2020 DOT bid letting, scheduled for next week:
- One sign project is concentrated in two areas: Cedar Rapids and Jones County. The former is replacing a lot of gore signs (the “EXIT” where you take the offramp, now formatted to include a large exit number), plus signs on the lower deck of the 5-in-1 bridge. Many BGSs whose poles snapped during the derecho (as they were designed to do) remain bent over today. I don’t know if they can be restored to their upright and locked position. The latter focuses on US 151 exits.
- Another is a mass replacement of roadside signs along many highways in southwest Iowa.
- A stoplight is going in on US 69 at NE 118th Avenue (Polk County name)/NE 54th Street (Ankeny name). You could call this a “pro-active” or “pre-emptive” stoplight because the sprawl has not reached this intersection…yet. This is just a mile south of the junction with former IA 87, the road to Elkhart, and 3 miles north of 1st Street and the pre-1970 extent of Ankeny.
- Mostly unrelated but not quite: I salute Mr. Daddy Won’t Sell the Farm at the northeast corner of US 69 and IA 160 (Ankeny Boulevard and Oralabor Road) on the other side of Ankeny. A Kwik Star just ate up the east half of the plot — part of that chain’s push into the Des Moines metro — and there’s a Fareway and Pizza Ranch across the street, but that little house and block of timber are there until the very end.