Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Parts of US 20 and US 30 in the eastern Rockies are getting an upgrade not in lanes, but in limits. The Wyoming Department of Transportation is phasing in 70-mph limits on lightly traveled rural highways this spring. Among the segments are 87 miles of US 20/26 west of Casper and the part of US 30 between Laramie and Rawlins that isn’t on I-80. (Historical note: While the latter is the Lincoln Highway corridor, the road of today is a straighter, safer version of what was there in the 1920s.)

Twenty-one months ago, Wyoming raised the speed limit on rural interstates, allowing drivers to legally do 80 on I-80. The closest 80-mph interstates to Iowa are I-29 between North Sioux City and Sioux Falls and I-90 between Sioux Falls and the Minnesota state line.

In Iowa, a proposal to raise the speed limit on two-lane roads to 60 mph didn’t make it anywhere this legislative session in part because it would cost money.

On March 11, Arkansas got the fictional phone prefix interstate designation it has been seeking for a long time. US 63 from I-55 northwest to Jonesboro, which was upgraded to four lanes in the 2000s, officially became Interstate 555. Jonesboro has a population smaller than Waterloo-Cedar Falls, but interstate designations carry cachet (and, more importantly, federal money). You can see how the south end of the new interstate looked before the interchange was upgraded on my national US 63 page.

What had been holding I-555 up was a three-mile segment that needed to be open to farm vehicles because without access to that bridge, they would have to go on a substantial detour. This is exactly the problem with the Des Moines beltway getting an interstate designation. Arkansas solved the problem by having a congressman write an exception into the highway bill that was signed in December. A little bit of substitution and…

“Operation Of Certain Specialized Vehicles On Certain Highways In The State Of Arkansas Iowa.—If any segment of United States Route 63 65 between the exits for highways 14 5 and 75 163 in the State of Arkansas Iowa is designated as part of the Interstate System, the single axle weight, tandem axle weight, gross vehicle weight, and bridge formula limits under subsection (a) and the width limitation under section 31113(a) of title 49 shall not apply to that segment with respect to the operation of any vehicle that could operate legally on that segment before the date of the designation.

Boom. Problem solved. However, this runs the risk of creating a slippery slope for interstate exemptions, and there isn’t going to be another true highway bill for at least five years.

One article says US 63 shields along the route will be “replaced”. I hope that I-555 shields will be supplementing, not replacing, 63 markers, but because it’s Arkansas there is a substantial chance that 63 will either disappear from the entire segment or only be signed on the mainline (like US 41 is disappearing into I-41 in Wisconsin). After Arkansas’ ridiculous request (and the Numbering Committee’s subsequent ridiculous approval) to extend 63 in an entirely opposite direction through the state down to I-20 in Louisiana, 63 was not signed along I-55 and I-40, effectively creating discontinuous segments.