Two-year project maintains IA 122 one-ways

I’m not quite sure why this isn’t listed on the DOT’s public information page, but this construction season is the first part of a two-year project to rebuild IA 122 in downtown Mason City.

The KIMT story has views of the map, whose most notable nugget is that the east end of the one-way will have the turn softened to a more gradual curve. But the one-way system stays intact, while recent projects in some cities intend to get rid of one-ways.

The Mason City project will take two years, and after that, here’s a question: Why should the state hold on to IA 122 east of downtown? Its current east end is the east city limits; the rest was peeled away in 2003. While it makes sense to keep the four-lane running east from I-35, which was US 18 until the Avenue of the Saints freeway was completed, I think the part running east of downtown would be a good urban decommissioning candidate. Even a partial truncation to, say, Illinois Avenue/Mason City High School still would get 3 miles off the books.

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