Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

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.

As construction on the US 30/218 interchange creeps along this fall, the remaining four-lane in Benton County is still waiting. And that means, yup, another meeting! This one is in Blairstown on Oct. 4. I don’t expect any surprises for the segment between 218 and about a mile east of the future IA 21 interchange.

The new lanes, to run just south of the existing ones, won’t be built for years — in fact, it won’t be until after June 2011, the 10th anniversary of the release of initial options for where to put the four-lane. For me, though, I would’ve preferred an ETA between five years ago and yesterday.