Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

This short item in the Carroll Daily Times Herald says the U.S. 30 Coalition will meet Friday in Nevada, but doesn’t say much else that hasn’t been mentioned elsewhere. Mainly it appears to say two things: The coalition will ask for more money, and the DOT director will explain why that won’t happen detail possible ways to raise money for road construction.

It’s interesting that the Carroll-Glidden segment is a four-lane priority. The road is already four lanes undivided from the east edge of Carroll, at County Road N33. But I suspect a lot of people commute on that road.

Why??

Among the October 2013 applications for the AASHTO Standing Committee on Highways, Special Committee on Route Numbering, were the reroutes of interstates in the St. Louis area for the new bridge, creating I-49 through Arkansas* (PDF), and a minor item from the Kansas Department of Transportation. KDOT wants to take US 40 off 6th Street in the west half of Lawrence and reroute it onto K-10. The change would take effect in April.

It sounds unassuming, until you look at the application (PDF). Kansas is going to take a highway that has a straightforward route through the city and shunt it onto a bypass, and then back north to rejoin the old route, which eventually runs north of I-70. The current distance on 6th Street between K-10 and US 59 is 4 miles; the new distance for US 40, co-signed around, with US 59, is 10.4 miles.

This doesn’t make sense. It takes some traffic off 6th and enables turnover to the city, but it doesn’t make any sense for the integrity of US 40 in that part of Kansas**. We can be thankful that KDOT is following the rules of not putting US highways on toll roads*** — if the Kansas Turnpike didn’t exist, it would be simple just to route 40 onto I-70 — but the fact the route is being noticeably lengthened and given a semi-circuitous route remains.

K-10 is a full freeway between Lawrence and the southwest part of metro Kansas City. The problem/issue with moving US 40 onto the near-entire alignment of K-10 is what happens in trying to get from the I-435/K-10 interchange back to existing US 40, which still has its own independent segment on the Missouri side of the metro far to the north. And I don’t think Missouri is keen on giving that up in order to put US 40 on I-435/I-470 on the south side of the metro over to Blue Springs, nor should it be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have another reason to dislike the change in alignment: It breaks up my continuously traveled stretch of US 40 from Denver to the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro, a distance of some 880 miles. I’ll have to go back down some time.

*Good luck trying to get a four-lane controlled-access highway built through the Ouachita Mountains in the modern era. It’s going to take a while. Of more immediate nature is when will I-540 be re-signed as I-49, and how will the exit numbers be managed?

**West of Topeka, US 40 is pushed onto I-70 for 290 miles, so the integrity of 40 in Kansas is somewhat compromised already. But it’s signed well.

***Illinois, this means you, and what you did to US 51 north of Rockford.

July 18, 2013: This plaque is the focal point of a larger stone monument at Old Frontenac, Minnesota, along US 61/63. A long article from 1927 about the history of the fort is online here.