Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Tuesday night is going to have a rarity for highway construction plans nowadays, a formal meeting. An “updated preliminary design” for the US 61 Wapello bypass comes six years after the initial proposal. It includes a huge change. The new design has a full interchange south of Wapello, northeast of the 65th Street/K Avenue intersection.

If this isn’t the first time that a city has succeeded in getting the state to change its four-lane plans in a big way, it’s one of a very few. The 2018 plan involved only one point of access to Wapello, the G62 exit. Residents and emergency services hated it. Then in 2019 the DOT offered a half-interchange slip ramp at the south end. Residents and emergency services still hated it. In 2020 the DOT offered a J-turn at the south end. The J-turn concept became so toxic in the 2010s that the Iowa DOT rebranded it as a “restricted crossing U-turn intersection.” That’s the name applied when the first one opened in Iowa southeast of Fort Dodge on US 20. (It wouldn’t have been needed if the new gas station there had opened up a mile to the west at the Coalville exit. Alas.)

But now — again, six years after the preliminary-but-ideally-final plan was released and Wapello raised holy hell — it very much looks like the city will get everything it wanted, even a Business 61 route.

In May 2021 I said that Thanksgiving 2030 would be a realistic possibility for completion of the four-lane US 61. As of now, the five-year plan has paving of the Wapello bypass in fiscal year 2029 (late 2028-early 2029). I may have a horn to toot later.

Starting today, according to an Iowa DOT press release, the intersection of US 218 and Maple Street on the north side of Janesville will be closed. A new road will be built alongside the railroad tracks heading north to a new intersection with 260th Street, which is getting an interchange with US 218.

The closure of the intersection is the next step in the plan to convert US 218 between Janesville and Waverly into a full freeway. Building an interchange between the C57 and Business 218 exits allows for current intersections in the area to feed into frontage roads.

This is, to my knowledge, the third interchange in Iowa with a gravel road. The other two are the River Road and Honey Creek exits on I-680 in Pottawattamie County. There will be some pavement on 260th, from the railroad eastward, and three of the four frontage roads will be paved. One of those is the Maple Street extension. One is an Easton Avenue extension that will use some of 218’s present northbound lanes as 218 finally gets a kink that’s been around since forever ironed out. The final paved extension, Eagle Avenue, will include a short segment over a stub of 1920s concrete that was bypassed long ago and ended its life as a driveway to a farmhouse that was torn down in 2020.

The Iowa Department of Transportation is having a special September letting. Contracts are accelerated rather than waiting until the normal date later in the month.

Four of the lettings are in Bremer, Polk, Scott, and Story counties. All of them are because a girder on the underside of a bridge got whacked by something. In Polk County, it’s on the I-80 eastbound flyover ramp in the west mixmaster.

Page from DOT letting showing damage to girder on I-80 bridge.

The other four lettings are in northwest Iowa for debris removal following the flooding this summer.