October 30, 2015: The Chambers Ford Bridge west of Belle Plaine has been closed to traffic for years. It consists of spans built in 1890 and 1903.
No buyers came forward for the Chambers Ford Bridge over the Iowa River in the southeast corner of Tama County. That means the county will demolish it next year and replace it. The bridge has two types of construction for its trusses, from two different years, making it a unique construction piece. However, as you can see above, it’s pretty far gone.
The plan for construction of an I-380 exit at Forevergreen Road in North Liberty is out. It includes upgrading I-380 to six lanes under Forevergreen but narrowing to two to the north. South of there, I-380 will be six-laned as part of an expected multi-part upgrade of the I-80 interchange. (As with I-35 in Ankeny, this is long overdue, and six-laning I-380 all the way up to US 30 should be added to the state’s priorities list IMO.)
I believe this is the first exit added to I-380 since its original construction.
August 24, 2013: The Bloomington Road bridge over Big Creek in Linn County is part of the Lincoln Highway loop route through Marion. Linn County had it taken down at the end of 2015.
As previously noted, a classic truss bridge in Linn County that is on the gravel Lincoln Highway loop through Marion but not old enough to officially qualify for being on the Lincoln Highway was doomed earlier this year when the supervisors voted to replace it.
The bridge was demolished last week. A basic concrete span will be built next year in its place.
Last week, shortly after the first diverging diamond interchange in Iowa opened in Dallas County, the Iowa DOT released plans for a second interchange of that style, also in the Des Moines metro area.
The DOT has multiple maps and the Register has an article ahead of a meeting scheduled for Dec. 15. The DOT is going to six-lane I-35 from 1st Street (former IA 931) to the north Ankeny exit that opened in 2011. The 1st Street exit will be turned from a diamond into a diverging diamond. However, this project will not be completed until the end of this decade — and honestly needed to be done a decade ago.
(Bonus: If you look reeealllly close at the fifth map, you can see the main building for the former southbound rest area intact in the satellite photo, something Austin Draude noticed a year ago.)
As the Iowa caucuses get nearer, so too does criticism about the state’s role in the presidential process. But Colin Woodard, whose research has divided much of North America into 11 “nations,” writes in Politico that Iowa’s settlement heritage makes it a good representative of the nation politics-wise. Europeans from the Danish to the Dutch (and especially the Germans) staked out their own locations in the state, and that mix of cultures still dominates the political geography.
(This also gives me a chance to link to Woodard’s original “American Nations” article, which has been sitting on my desktop for two years. Both articles are long reads. Both articles have his map, which puts all of Iowa except the northern tier and Driftless Area into the Midlands, while those areas are part of Yankeedom. Kossuth County makes for an obvious interruption of the dividing line, which could have been smoothed out by placing the second-northernmost tier of counties east of Kossuth County, plus Fayette, into Yankeedom.)
The Politico article does have some factual errors, though:
UPDATE 12/5: Dan Drackley saw another error in the article, and made a case for Sioux Falls TV attention.
The Keokuk Daily Gate City reports that River Road (County Road X28) south of Montrose reopened about 10 days ago. The road had been closed since July because of a slide, and a temporary fix has been applied.
September 28, 2014: “Highway 965” appeared on detour signs on I-380 because that’s the street’s official name, for now at least.
Iowa Highway 965 was born in 1985, running between the south side of Cedar Rapids and Coralville when US 218 was moved onto I-380. It was signed even though it was a 900-series highway. In 1994, however, the segment inside the city of North Liberty was turned over to the city, splitting the highway in two. The city made “Highway 965” the official street name (rather than “Old Highway 218”), presumably to keep a semblance of continuity. But then, when the rest of 965 (except for the tiny piece between I-80 and US 6) was killed off in 2003, North Liberty had a designation attached to a road that no longer existed in the public eye.
Long story short, “Highway 965” has been around twice as long as IA 965 technically ran through North Liberty, has been around a decade since other signs were gone, and now the city is finally thinking about changing it. Old highways never die, they just change designations.
Kraig Paulsen resigned as speaker of the Iowa House of Representatives earlier this year and he will not run for re-election in his suburban Cedar Rapids seat. An election to replace a former speaker is interesting in its own right, but a new candidate could bring statewide attention to the race.
KCRG morning anchorwoman Ashley Hinson* left the TV station just last week, and this week announced her plans: She’s going to run for Paulsen’s seat, House District 67, as a Republican.
House 67 (PDF) contains the cities of Hiawatha and Robins, the northwest part of Marion, and Cedar Rapids east of Council Street and north of Collins Road. It is also one of the two House districts that make up Liz Mathis’ Senate district. As in, former KCRG/KWWL anchorwoman and now Democratic state senator Liz Mathis.
Those two women aren’t the only Iowa TV people to get into politics: Tami Wiencek served one term in the 2000s representing part of Waterloo as a Republican.
The I-80 interchange at Alice’s Road Grand Prairie Parkway between Waukee and West Des Moines is scheduled to open Dec. 1, the Des Moines Register reports. The interchange is a diverging diamond, where traffic temporarily runs on the left side of the road to eliminate left turns across traffic. It’s the first exit of its kind in Iowa, just as Mills Civic Parkway was the first SPUI (single-point urban interchange) in Iowa in 2003.
The exit adds a western outlet/inlet for Dallas County’s continuing urban sprawl. It is the first new exit to open in Iowa since Ankeny’s Northeast 36th Street exit on I-35 Nov. 20, 2012.
My iMac turned six years old this month. I still use it as my main machine. It runs Mac OS 10.6.8, the last release that allows use of PowerPC applications. It’s also the last version before form began running roughshod over function in basic visual elements, with pastels, super-thin fonts, abstract iconography, and nearly invisible borders flying in the face of what used to be the interface guidelines. (That’s not just my opinion; two longtime experts have written a long dissertation about Apple’s departure from its once-rock-solid design principles. Jony Ive never should’ve been allowed on the software side, period.)
My computer has had some metaphorical creaking now and then, most recently when the weather application on my menubar abruptly stopped working (the server isn’t accessible anymore, and I’ve found a replacement). The best peripheral in the world isn’t being made anymore. I’ve dealt with a broken video card and the vertical DVD drive has ceased to function (thank goodness for cheap externals), but otherwise it still does everything I want to do. And on Dec. 8, Apple will declare my iMac officially obsolete.
While I have problems with some of what Apple has done since Steve Jobs’ death (there is an iPhoto/Photos rant yet to be written), the Mac is still the best computer out there. However, today, Apple can fairly be described as a mobile-device company that happens to make computers. I read recently that Apple sold more iPhones and iPads in a quarter than all Macs in existence. (In 2011, all iOS devices in a year outstripped the Mac total.)
While my computer is firmly grounded in the beginning of this decade, my active Internet work is even older. Iowa Highway Ends is now 14 years old. See that tagline in the upper right hand corner of the blog? Where I tout the “organic, occasionally hand-crafted HTML” that I still use for everything except the blog itself? That was supposed to be tongue in cheek but guess what — it’s cool again! From the linked Washington Post story:
Nostalgia for a purer, simpler time has already brought back the flip phone [What do you mean, “brought back”? — Ed.] and the cassette. So it was only a matter of time, really, until someone attempted to revive the ’90s era Internet.
You’ll find their communes clustered on the edges of the modern Web, just outside the glow of Twitter and Facebook: static homepages built entirely in HTML [ahem], or social networks running off a single Unix computer.
They’re not sentimental, the old-timers argue; they’re not pining for some dial-up past. Rather, they’re pretty sure the modern Internet is screwed — and they’re reverting to its last, truly viable version.
As someone who has HTML code old enough to vote, this looks like it’s right up my alley. (My Angelfire page is still active, along with the former index to this website before I migrated it. The pages haven’t been updated, but they are still there.) Bandwidth is one component — the “everything streamed and in the cloud” crowd needs a reality check from the Great Flyover — but there’s more.
Consider the autoplay videos, “social sharing” buttons, screens that cover the content of the page to get you to sign up for a mailing list, autoplay ads, “read more” lines/images that interrupt what you’re currently reading, “optimized for mobile” layouts that are useless on real computers*, autoplay videos, and endless calls to Google and Facebook APIs that slow down loading. What ISN’T attractive about nice, clean, width-of-the-window pages that load text and images and then don’t load anything else?** There are times I want the entire Internet to revert to its circa-2009 stage, before “YouTube celebrity” became something some people write/say with a straight face. I still frequent online forums that work about the same way they would have in 1999, for that matter. (Sadly, the MacAddict Forums have been dead for five years this month, MacAddict itself was renamed MacLife, and now it doesn’t even have a dedicated website.)
But I cannot stem the tide. I can only row along in my little boat, and as long as it’s seaworthy with a little duct tape that’s good enough for me.
*ESPN, SI, and Fox Sports, this means you.
**If we’re really going back to ’90s webpage design, a mottled-background pattern is an absolute must. I was ahead of the curve when I went for plain white in 2001.
