Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

May 19, 2015: US 63 in Malcom, with a construction project literally just over the horizon.

Concrete from the earliest decades of Iowa’s highway era still exists and is often drivable. To the best of my knowledge, there’s only one place where a significant segment is the topmost layer on a state-maintained route: Half a mile of US 63 through Malcom, with more than 2500 vehicles a day rumbling over it.

The road narrows when approaching from the south side of town, and the lips of the curbs plus the aggregate composition (large pebbles) indicate this is very old pavement. This pavement was laid in 1935, in a segment from old US 6 to the railroad tracks. It will soon be covered by a hot mix asphalt overlay. Construction is already going on north of Malcom (overlay) and at I-80 (new southbound lanes of short four-lane segment).

Construction of an interchange for US 218/IA 27 at County Road C57, which just started, will make the corridor between Janesville and Cedar Falls a full controlled-access freeway. Now the state is making moves toward sealing off the last at-grade intersections between there and Waverly.

A meeting scheduled for June 2 will go over the environmental assessment (PDF) — not the environmental impact statement, yet — of the corridor. An interchange has been proposed for 260th Street, halfway between Janesville and Waverly. It would be only the third fourth interchange with an all-gravel road in Iowa. The intersection with old 218 on the north side of Janesville would be closed off and a long paved road built to the northwest paralleling the railroad tracks.

The preferred alternative would alter and straighten the present four-lane. (There’s a slight kink that has been there in some form ever since the road was built.) The report linked above provides a taste of just how much work goes into merely thinking about making improvements to a road.

Many of the discarded alternatives included the sentence, “This alternative would increase the out-of- distance travel to Waverly or into Janesville to access U.S. 218 and would have high impacts due to frontage roads.” That’s not good. However, the number of fatalities along this road make the status quo unacceptable, the DOT says.

CORRECTION 6/8: The I-80 Atalissa/Rochester exit is also to a gravel road. (The two I was thinking of were Honey Creek and I-680 Exit 1.)

May 20, 2003: The curve seen here heading left (north) will be removed in 2018. In the decade since IA 363’s decommissioning, the ex-state highway has only been known by its county and city names, 55th Street and Sunset Street.

The Iowa DOT will remove the large curve of IA 150 west of Urbana, at former IA 363’s west end, after a two-vehicle collision resulted in the deaths of five people earlier this year. The four-way intersection near the curve will become the main intersection. Construction ($1.5 million) has a target period of fiscal 2018, although this was not included in the draft five-year plan released earlier this week.

The DOT released a 7-page study after the accident (link via Vinton Today website). Three-quarters of the traffic at the intersection runs east-west, heading to/from I-380. Southbound IA 150 will stop and northbound 150 will have a left turn. (The headline below is incorrect; it is not an S-curve.)