Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The plans for changing IA 17 east of Boone are available. The meeting is Thursday at United school. The final decision was the “Red plan” from a set of proposals three years ago.

According to the maps, IA 17 will continue straight north for an additional mile from where it meets E41 today, then go east on 200th Street. There will be a bridge for 17 across E41 and the railroad tracks with a arcing connector. In addition, 200th Street will be paved west from new 17 to the Boone city limits.

This marks the end of a state intersection that has been around since at least 1930. Its exact history before that, though, is murky. I know that the Lincoln Highway did not parallel the railroad on the south side for a 2-mile segment between R Avenue and T Avenue; instead, it crossed the railroad and used 205th Street, then continued east to Ames via 210th Street. I don’t know if that was changed in the 1920s, because it would have involved building a new road for the end result of moving the place where the highway crossed the railroad.

The new 17’s east-west mile will be half a mile north of that original segment, and thus the known Lincoln Highway segment between 205th Street and the Jordan elevator will drop from the state rolls.

Notably, this plan does not make any special accommodations for the farm field on the southeast corner of the 17/E41 intersection, which is used as the parking lot for the Farm Progress Show/Central Iowa Expo grounds.

Three-lane conversions are still getting substantial advocacy from the Iowa DOT.

In Des Moines, the city council has approved a pilot project to change Euclid Avenue (US 6) from four lanes to three for 10 blocks in the Oak Park and Highland Park neighborhoods. (The east end of the project, 2nd Avenue, is the junction of 6 and IA 415.) Parking spaces would be substituted for the through lanes. The KCCI story does not say if those spaces would be metered.

In Sioux City, the DOT wants to whack a lane off IA 12 in its southernmost two miles, from about the Military Road intersection to I-29. Unlike Des Moines, though, there are few intersections along the route. KTIV also reports the Americans with Disabilities Act is a factor.

The road diet revolt has gone better in some places than others. In Grundy Center, widespread opposition resulted in a packed community meeting where the DOT tried to justify its strategy, while saying such a change would not move forward without the city’s support. Some Waverly residents are begging the city to reverse its decision to make IA 3 three lanes.

One place the three-lane strategy isn’t happening is Sioux Center, where KIWA reports the idea is to expand US 75 through the city to five lanes, with the center lane as a turn lane with strategically placed dividers. In a place where there are a lot of businesses with their own driveways, I can see where center lanes would be a positive.

July 6, 2013: Clarence is the only town between Missouri Valley and besides Clinton in eastern Iowa where US 30 still runs through its heart. How long will that remain the case?

Upgrading US 30 to four lanes between Lisbon and De Witt is a project that doesn’t have much in the way of similar things in Iowa highway construction.

For many other projects, relocation was a theoretically simpler affair. US 20 between Waterloo and Dubuque? Move the whole thing a mile and a half south. IA 60? Stay on the east side of the railroad and have square-ish bypasses where necessary. US 218? Fewer towns and water features. The best parallels might be US 151 and IA 163, with their non-straight routes, but even those are imperfect. Often, the where was easier settled than the how (and especially the when).

Now, in an update from the April meeting, documents released June 19 give a clearer picture of where bypasses might be, and it’s kind of a mess. We have a whole bunch of small communities that don’t cleanly stick to one side or the other, plus a parallel railroad that swaps sides, plus a water feature (Yankee Run) that closely parallels a sizable segment and a big ol’ spot of wetlands in the Wapsipinicon River area.

Either US 30 stays on the present alignment or goes a bit south of Mechanicsville, Stanwood, and Clarence, that’s pretty evident. Past there, far-north and far-south options have been sketched out. The former would miss the present road and railroad by a mile. The latter would, ironically, come back near or even on portions of the Lincoln Highway/pre-1956 alignment but destroy much of the structural integrity of that route. (What I mean is, trying to follow what’s left of the LH would be a nightmare. I need a better term for this.)

This won’t get past the “commencing to proceed to get started” stage for a while, but the revised study area gives more detail on where to look.

UPDATE 3/3/21: Never too late to fix a grievous error, right? D’oh. Sorry, Carroll, Denison, and Logan.

June 23, 2014: Facing south, but heading north, on US 61 at I-55, Scott City, Missouri.

US 61 in Missouri is two very different highways. North of St. Louis, it is part of the Avenue of the Saints, a project that took two decades to complete. It’s a fast-moving four-lane except for Hannibal, which at this point I doubt will ever get a bypass no matter how much local governments beg for it. Eventually, 61 breaks off to run down Lindbergh Boulevard in suburban St. Louis. Once upon a time it was an expressway bypass but now is a heavy-use arterial.

South of St. Louis, US 61 is a lazy two-lane that hovers in the shadow of I-55. Its biggest change since creation is that, in 1953, it was rerouted onto MO 25 from Jackson (near Cape Girardeau) to Festus to be much closer to the future interstate corridor rather than follow today’s MO 72 to Fredericktown and US 67 north of there.

Traveling this portion is not for the pressed-of-time, and indeed I spaced out segments along five different road trips including the return from the 2012 Liberty Bowl. I can only imagine how mind-numbing, or nerve-wracking, it was when it was the only road between St. Louis and Memphis.

When US 61 does meet I-55, the interweaving can be a bit odd, and that’s especially evident at Scott City. There, 61 crosses over itself, or more accurately curves over the space between the southbound and northbound interstate ramps, and following northbound 61 requires two left turns in about 360 feet.

This year, the Missouri DOT is going to finish a project that removes that issue. A new interchange is being built to the south, where US 61 will join I-55 to go north past the Cape Girardeau airport to a different complicated interchange where U-turning from southbound 55 to northbound 61 involves entirely different streets than following 61 through either all-south or all-north.

The new routing is about 2.5 miles long and approved in the spring 2019 AASHTO route numbering meeting (large PDF, starting at page 57), but construction is still going on. What’s bypassed will become a Business 61.

Since part of the new segment is an all-new road, and 61 will be signed on part of I-55 it wasn’t before, that’s going to add a second untraveled portion of the route for me in the state. I was hoping that all I’d have left was 17 miles between Festus and Bloomsdale.

Aside from the one-soon-to-be-two pieces, I was doing pretty darn good, having traveled 61 from the I-69 stub (near the Harrah’s casino that went bust) in far northern Mississippi all the way to its north end north of St. Paul. Considering that I’ve already been to every county with an interstate on or near the Mississippi River north of Vicksburg, it’s going to take a heck of a reason to grab 20 miles. Let’s say … Iowa State in the Sugar Bowl.