Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

October 31, 2013: Polk County Supervisor Angela Connolly (holding scissors) and other city and county officials cut the ribbon to open a diagonal road between Army Post Road and IA 28 (1st/63rd streets) in West Des Moines at Brown’s Woods Forest Preserve.

Part of a construction plan 20 years in the making has been scrapped.

The Des Moines Register reports that the eastern part of the Southwest Connector, which was intended to run from Brown’s Woods to a point south of downtown Des Moines, will not move forward. City officials say traffic on Fleur Drive and Park Avenue has not increased enough to merit construction of a new road.

West Des Moines, which named its segment of the road Veterans Parkway a while ago, has made progress on its segments (breaking up Army Post Road in the process). That city’s long-term expansionism sets up an intersection between the parkway and a southern extension of Alice’s Road Grand Prairie Parkway in the vicinity of the intersection of 105th Street and Vintage Avenue in Madison County.

Des Moines’ Southeast Connector, which opened between SE 15th and SE 30th Streets in 2016, is moving forward, with a connection to US 65 opening sometime in the next decade.

Last Thursday, about half of the portion of US 20 in Iowa that remained two lanes at the end of 2012 opened to four lanes. It’s the segment between Holstein and Early, reopening after a detour that moved travelers onto the original 1926 alignment on County Road D15 through Galva.

There’s a story from KTIV, but I can’t embed it because the redesign of all Quincy Newspapers websites has removed it as an option. Has there been ANY major media organization’s website redesign in the past six years that made things better?

Anyway.

For decades, the Highway 20 Corridor Association has prodded the state of Iowa to make US 20 four lanes across the state. When the final segment opens in a matter of days (!!!), the long-sought victory will result in the group’s irrelevance. The organization will disband at the end of the year, Radio Iowa reports.

The Iowa DOT has a “corridor preservation plan” out for a road northwest of Oskaloosa, running from IA 163 to US 63. This step in making a bypass seems, to me, like a relatively recent thing, but I could be wrong and/or didn’t see notices years ago.

The map (PDF) shows a general southwest inclination starting a few miles north of Oskaloosa, but then the corridor takes a sharp turn west to a larger preservation area that would include a future interchange. This will mean that 63 will exit from the existing four-lane — exiting from itself, so to speak — in a weird way. It also raises the question of how mile-marking will change between this point and the current 63/163 split south of Oskaloosa, which just so happens to be Exit 60 in both directions.

A look at the satellite view makes me wonder why they can’t put the interchange closer to Kirby Avenue, which would cut down the out-of-the-way-ness of that southernmost part of the bypass. That’s where 163 deviates from the original path into Oskaloosa straight south, making a seemingly ideal place for a trumpet interchange and a place where northbound 63 could go relatively “straight ahead”.

For what it’s worth, the bypass will create the westernmost point of US 63 north of the Arkansas/Louisiana state line, replacing the current point, which is just north of where the bypass is expected to rejoin current 63.