Feb 10

Gladbrook school in danger of closing

Posted on Tuesday, February 10, 2015, at 10:17 AM by Jeff

Gladbrook-Reinbeck is considering reducing its school facilities, and closing the K-8 building in Gladbrook is one option, reports the Waterloo Courier. The others involve rearranging grades between the two towns but all put all of a grade’s students in one place.

With just under 600 students this year, G-R is about the median-sized district in the state — but that’s 100 fewer than in 2008, and 250 fewer than in 2000. Gladbrook’s foray above the 1000-population threshold ended before the 2010 census.

A school closure would be the first in Tama County since South Tama brought elementary classes to a new building southwest of the high school in 2006 and closed Chelsea in 2008.

My guess is the football field would remain on the northwest side of Gladbrook, by the Tama County Fairgrounds, since new locker rooms were built there recently.

Even closer to home, North Tama Superintendent Bob Cue wrote a guest column for the Cedar Rapids Gazette and a letter to The Des Moines Register about school funding. How G-R goes about dealing with its financial and enrollment shortfalls could have an effect on North Tama, which shares a long border.

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Feb 09

KWWL drops counties from weather map

Posted on Monday, February 9, 2015, at 10:22 AM by Jeff

In the first week of February, maps shown on KWWL during the weather portion of the newscast looked different. The map, which is still squashed vertically*, now only displays 21 counties.

Howard, Floyd, Franklin, Jackson, and Mitchell counties are gone, in addition to Crawford and Grant in Wisconsin and Jo Daviess in Illinois. However, Charles City and Prairie du Chien are still included in the map for forecast highs/lows.

Also during the first week of February, a tweet from Weather Services International said, “We are pleased to announce @KWWL in Waterloo, IA debuted #Max this week!” Compare the map in that tweet with Mark Schnackenberg’s Jan. 31 blog post. WSI is a subsidiary of the Weather Channel. Perhaps the two events are connected.

If this is a permanent change, KWWL has now shrunk to the bare minimum of the Eastern Iowa DMA, and Franklin County loses its place as a hub of Iowa television stations. As you can see on my Iowa TV maps and table (shameless plugs!), all of the counties dropped from the KWWL map are on at least one other TV station’s map (but does Charles City really prefer KTTC?).

So far, this is just for the daily newscasts; whether this also applies to severe weather coverage has yet to be seen. Schools in those counties still probably will send information in to the station. (For the record, the Super Bowl was unobstructed by a closings/cancellations scroll.)

*The map makes Tama County a square. Tama County is not a square. It’s not like there isn’t room for correct proportions!

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Feb 08

License Plate Letters — DBB

Posted on Sunday, February 8, 2015, at 11:33 AM by Jeff

The question has been answered: Iowa will not be skipping “D” in the first position of the alphabetical side of the new cycle of license plates.

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Feb 06

A History of Concrete Paving in Iowa

Posted on Friday, February 6, 2015, at 11:25 AM by Jeff


June 4, 2014: This concrete on old US 20 east of Cushing is from 1932. Old 20 west of Cushing to Sioux City was paved by 1924.

If that headline has you clicking for more, you’ve come to the right place, or at least the link to the right place.

A presentation at the 2013 Iowa Better Concrete Conference (second only to the Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival in ticket demand, one must presume) delved into Iowa’s “rich history of concrete paving.” Included in the history is construction on Correctionville Road in the 1920s that predates designation of the route as US 20.

The 2013 presentation is by the same DOT engineer, Todd Hanson, who created a 2009 report marking a century of concrete use in Iowa. According to those, the oldest still used today is Eddyville Cemetery Road — this now-dead-end stub right beside new US 63. Both reports mention a segment of “Moscow Road” being the second-oldest in current use, but this is NOT County Road X54 (which has that for its E911 name). The road being referred to runs west of the unincorporated town of Moscow, named River Street locally and 112th Street in the county system. It was part of the River-to-River Road in 1910, which later became US 32, and was bypassed in 1930. (The Muscatine County engineer helped me clear this up.)

There’s a reason Iowa’s association with concrete is so deep. From Discovering Iowa’s Historic Transportation Milestones (1999) (PDF):

Iowa’s first paving job using asphalt concrete was completed in 1928. The contractor required that a “royalty” fee be paid on the project. Fred White, chief engineer for the Highway Commission at that time, said the payment of royalty fees by the highway department would never happen again. Thus, it wasn’t until the 1950s that asphalt concrete was again considered for use on primary roads through the regular state construction lettings.

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Feb 05

Davenport could kill east-west one-way pair

Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Third and Fourth streets in downtown Davenport are one-way streets, and the city council is looking into eliminating those, reports WQAD.

This would not affect the north-south one-ways on Brady and Harrison streets carrying Business 61.

Cedar Rapids has approved a plan to get rid of many one-way streets in downtown over the next five years. (PDF map) The trade-off on that, though, is that quite a few intersections with stoplights would be converted to all-way stops.

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Feb 04

DOT committed to interchange at 65/330

Posted on Wednesday, February 4, 2015, at 10:38 AM by Jeff

After years of public meetings and study, the US 65/IA 330/IA 117 intersection in Jasper County will be upgraded to an interchange. The interchange will be northeast of the current intersection and both the present intersection and the F17 intersection will be closed.

The DOT has created an explanatory PDF (with interchange diagram) and a memorandum on traffic control options to back up a decision that has been vocally protested by the landowner who will be most affected.

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Feb 03

Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge being demolished

Posted on Tuesday, February 3, 2015, at 3:05 PM by Jeff

A major bridge that carried Route 66 traffic for a while near St. Louis, the westbound I-270 Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge, was partially imploded today.

The Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge — not the one over the Mississippi River, but to the east in Illinois — had a replacement built last year. From the mid-1960s until 1979, the pair of spans carried US 66 as well. (US 66 was truncated to Joplin in 1979.)

The canal bridge that connects to the old Chain of Rocks Bridge is still alive and well.

Another piece of Route 66 history was lost last year when the vehicle deck was removed from the MacArthur Bridge in downtown St. Louis. You can see the old Missouri approach and the decking in the Google Maps satellite view.

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Feb 03

Forevergreen Road exit and interchange rebuild ahead

Posted on Tuesday, February 3, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

These stories from KWWL and KCRG cover two separate things — the 80/380 cloverleaf and a potential exit at Forevergreen Road in North Liberty — but they have a common thread in location and timeline.

Under the most recent five-year plan, the Forevergreen Road exit would be  built in 2019, and the first new exit on I-380 since its completion. Work on converting I-80/380 from a cloverleaf to a more advanced interchange would start the year before.

Six-laning of I-380 is not a part of those plans, but those two projects will make travel between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City more complicated.

Posted in Construction | Comments Off on Forevergreen Road exit and interchange rebuild ahead
Feb 02

Iowa enrollment: Waukee adds NT’s entire student body

Posted on Monday, February 2, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The certified enrollment numbers for Iowa’s public school districts were released at the end of last week. While the total is slightly up from last year, the bulk of that growth is concentrated in the state’s largest districts.

Ankeny and Waukee continue to show no signs of slowing down. Those two districts alone account for half of the statewide net gain. In fact, Waukee’s growth is equivalent to North Tama’s entire enrollment. North Tama is among the 60 percent of districts with enrollment under 600 that lost students.

To get the combined student increase of Ankeny (444) and Waukee (484), counting up solely from districts that added students this year (starting with +1), you would need to count about 100 districts. Only 18 districts that were the same in area last year and this year added more than 100 students, period.

One of those adding more than 100 was Bondurant-Farrar, another suburban Des Moines district. In one decade, B-F has gone from the state’s 101st-largest district to the 54th-largest. The Bluejays have hit the jackpot, in more ways than one.

Meanwhile, in rural districts, the slide continues. There are six this year with fewer than 160 students. One (Corwith-Wesley) will not exist next school year, and two others (Prescott and Walnut) may be on borrowed time. Des Moines has more students than Iowa’s 100 smallest districts combined; Ankeny, about the bottom 46 combined. Only seven of the 25 smallest districts that existed when the Class of 2015 started kindergarten will be around for their graduation.

The below graph counts student enrollment for all Iowa districts outside the top 11 (those with enrollment above 7500). As you can see, this data set tells a different story. It has the same small uptick as the state at large, but the overall decline in the first decade of the century is very visible.

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Jan 30

Could Jefferson Highway be signed like Lincoln Highway?

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2015, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


July 11, 2004: This Jefferson Highway turn stone has been placed on the interpretive walking trail at the Reed-Niland corner in Colo. Photo taken on day of dedication of renovated Niland station.

Earlier this month, the Osceola Sentinel reported the city council there supports marking the Jefferson Highway, or Pine to Palm, as an Iowa heritage byway. The centennial of the Jefferson Highway is next year. In Iowa, it followed US 69 south of Ames and US 65 north of Colo (and the Lincoln Highway in between).

I am not aware of any comprehensive log of the Jefferson Highway’s earliest route(s) in the state, unlike the Lincoln which has been well-documented in the past 20 years. Deviations from the current routes in Iowa that I can think of offhand would include:

  • Old US 69 between Davis City and Leon
  • Indianola Avenue, 7th Street, and Grand Avenue from the Polk-Warren county line to the intersection of Grand and Southeast 14th Street (see Jason Hancock’s Highways of Des Moines page and my US 69 page)
  • the Lincoln Highway between Ames and Colo
  • a route through Hubbard and then on S33
  • D15 and S45 east of Iowa Falls
  • S43 through Chapin, and then the pavement half a mile east of present US 65 that goes through Rockwell

More on this as the applications progress, hopefully.

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