Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

May 11, 2002: South end of IA 322 in Pammel State Park. Photo by Neil Bratney.

Semi drivers making bad decisions caused a state highway to be renumbered in 1982. From the DOT’s newly online primary route archive:

The park officer at Pammel State Park has expressed concern of evident con­fusion of semi trucks turning south on Iowa 162 (two to three trucks per week) while apparently looking for US 169 approximately 1 ¼ miles east of Iowa 162. It is very difficult for these vehicles to turn around. Due to the inconvenience caused by the closeness of route numbers, Iowa 162 should be re-designated as Iowa 322 to eliminate this confusion.

The first two digits were doubled from “16” to “32” to clear up confusion; the last digit stayed 2 because IA 324 was already in use.

There’s one highway mystery solved, but there’s still another: Why was IA 19, a nice small number stuck as a 2-mile road to Backbone State Park, renumbered IA 410 in the late 1950s? The legal descriptions don’t shed any light on this one.

Iowa’s network of four-lane roads grew substantially in the 1990s, but it came with the tradeoff that most of them had at-grade intersections. That has proven to be a problem in certain locations as traffic increased. Right now, construction on an interchange between US 218 and C57 in Black Hawk County will result in the closure of all intersections between Waterloo and Waverly.

There are only two rural locations in Iowa where a four-lane intersects a numbered highway without an interchange. One is the US 65/IA 330 intersection, where an interchange should be built by the end of the decade despite the landowner’s efforts to fight it, and the other is where US 218 splits from the Avenue of the Saints at Floyd.

The death of a motorcyclist at the Floyd intersection last month sparked a meeting where more than 100 people voiced support for an interchange, the Mason City Globe Gazette reports. (I’d link to KIMT, but there is something on its website that triggers a download of some file, and that’s not good form.)

An interchange would have to be built to the southeast, away from a fill pond and a gas station, but not too far because there is a cemetery half a mile away. There’s a mention of a roundabout floating out there, in which case, (bleep) no.

The Floyd intersection has been added as a point of discussion in the Iowa Highway Commission’s meeting Tuesday, reports radio station KCHA, which also says there’s a truck stop being built at the location. That will complicate any plans for an interchange or grade separation.

July 15, 2007: East end of IA 934 approaching the complicated US 63/218 interchange.

IA 934 is gone as soon as the Iowa Transportation Commission finalizes a $28 million agreement with the city of Waterloo. The Waterloo city council voted unanimously to approve transfer of jurisdiction, the Courier reports.

University Avenue, old US 218, will eventually be rebuilt. It is likely to be reduced from six lanes to four, but whether it will be infested with roundabouts like Cedar Falls is doing is a question that won’t be settled until after many, many meetings.