Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Take it away, Internet:

But seriously, Real Soon Now is actually real soon now. There’s actual construction happening on the IA 100 bypass of western Cedar Rapids. It is scheduled to be built in two stages, Edgewood Road to Covington Road and then to US 30/218. It should be done around the end of the decade; the KCRG story embedded below says 2020 but the plan says paving will be done in 2016 and 2018. The Edgewood Road exit will be the state’s second SPUI, after George Mills Parkway on I-35 in West Des Moines.

Also in Linn County, the Mount Vernon/Lisbon bypass is in the five-year plan to be graded in 2017 and built in 2019. That’s some good news for US 30, to counteract the bad news that future four-laning in Benton County will be delayed.

October 13, 2006: The first signs you see after IA 92 enters the state from Illinois are going to change this summer.

A city route that has been a part of the Iowa highway system for more than nine decades will cease to be state-maintained on July 1.

In the DOT’s five-year plan is a “transfer of jurisdiction” line item regarding IA 92 from the southwest corner of the Muscatine bypass to the Norbert Beckey Bridge. The mostly diagonal road following Grandview Avenue and Mississippi Drive has been part of the state highway system since its inception in 1920, becoming part of a multi-state highway numbered 92 in 1939 and carrying US 61 from 1926 to 1984.

In order to keep continuity of the route, IA 92 will be moved onto the US 61 bypass, creating a triplex with US 61 and IA 22 on Muscatine’s north side, and then come south on Park Avenue to the bridge. The transferred road will still be signed as Business 61. If IA 38’s south end gets truncated to the bypass, which is likely since it will be redundant south of there, it will be the third time that it’s been pulled back from downtown Muscatine to that vicinity. It happened before in 1925 and 1969, when there was a Y-intersection near the current one.

The city of Muscatine is accepting of this change because it has wanted to carry out a “Mississippi Drive Corridor Project” to renovate it. The state will give the city $13 million and unload some urban mileage in the process.

This is the first major change in IA 92’s alignment since the Knoxville bypass and new road east to Mahaska County opened in 1978. The four-lane upgrade west of Knoxville and the new South Omaha bridge closely followed existing alignments. The route will be about five miles longer.

More information and photos can be found on the IA 92, IA 38, and Business 61 Muscatine pages as well as my Muscatine highway chronology.

November 21, 2001: The soon-to-be-former west end of unsigned IA 934, University Avenue in Cedar Falls and Waterloo.

There are two big surprises in the DOT’s five-year plan, released Tuesday, and they both have to do with unloading urban arterial streets. First, out of Monday’s Cedar Falls City Council meeting:

Resolution approving and authorizing execution of an Agreement for Transfer of Public Road Jurisdiction with the Iowa Department of Transportation relative to the transfer of jurisdiction for University Avenue/Iowa 934.

Waterloo Courier article here. KWWL story here. A former city councilman says it was “sprung up on us,” which may be true for the actual action but not as to what the state has been trying to do almost since it reasserted control over University Avenue after a lapse in the 1990s. The state would love to drop $20 million on Cedar Falls’ doorstep and get out so fast there’d be skid marks.

Waterloo, however, is not involved in this, so come July 1 (?) there may be a new west end to IA 934 at the city limits. The Courier article notes at the end that the Transportation Commission must approved the deal, presumably when it approves the rest of the five-year plan.

The second surprise is also in eastern Iowa. I’ll have more on that later.

Do I need to explain this again, Greater Des Moines Partnership? I wrote a blog post on the Des Moines beltway back in September 2012, too. Talking with DC officials about making it an interstate is less important than getting advice from and working with the state DOT.

I would love for the beltway to become I-435, but there is a major regulation stopping it. It’s mentioned in the linked story — a minimum speed limit. The east side of the beltway doesn’t have one — that’s what those “VEHICLE SPEED UNDER 40 MPH MUST EXIT” signs at the Hubbell Avenue and US 69 exits are for — because it is a vital bridge for bicycle and tractor traffic.

A minimum speed limit would ban bicycles and farm equipment from using the east beltway and, most importantly, its Des Moines River bridge. The next crossings to the west and east are East 14th Street and IA 316. You can see on the official state map for bicyclists that the freeway is open for them.

If the Partnership wants the beltway to become an interstate, it needs to work with the Iowa DOT on one of two things: Either provide an alternate route for low-speed traffic across the Des Moines River (i.e. build another road from Army Post Road to Vandalia Drive with a bridge), or explain to a bunch of angry farmers and bicyclists that they can’t cross the river there anymore and have to go to Runnells. Conduct a study to see how many people the move would actually affect. If it’s not many, then maybe making I-435 won’t be too much of a problem after all. Otherwise, we’ll just have to live with it not being a pretty interstate-colored line on the map.