Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

I travel the whole thing and THEN it gets new pretty signs.

May 14, 2010: The current style of Great River Road shields in Iowa is a square smaller than square highway shields. This is at the north end of old IA 364 in Harpers Ferry.

When the Iowa DOT introduced a “graphic identity” for the state’s 10 official scenic byways plus the Lincoln Highway in 2010, the Great River Road was left out, perhaps because it already had a unique shield. Wisconsin and Illinois use Great River Road shields equal in size to regular highway signs, but Iowa’s were smaller.

At the end of last year, the DOT had a sign letting to replace every Great River Road sign with a larger one matching the new scenic byway style. The GRR logo will be centered in a larger black rectangle with a rounded top and the words “National Scenic Byway” underneath.

The DOT’s byway-signing manual is available online (PDF), with two recent and important changes:

• The arrows that go under highway shields will now all be 21 inches by 15 inches, conforming to the latest standards in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. This is three inches shorter in width than a square shield (24×24), which will annoy me to no end. Arrow shapes that until now have been squares and the “ahead” arrow, which had been interchangeable with left/right arrows (see the IA 96 page for examples of all of these), will be squeezed into this new shape.
• “Beginning with the 2016 construction season, the Iowa DOT will require Perforated Square Steel Tube (PSST) posts for new sign installations.” That means no more wood, which again, is a change from what’s been used in Iowa since forever. I think the metal poles look flimsier than wood, but they may be better in windy conditions because they’re more flexible.

April 20, 2008: Former sign at a road intersecting I-172 in Adams County, Illinois.

I-172 is an interstate spur in far western Illinois connecting Quincy to Interstate 72. For decades, I-72 ended where I-172 began, until a new bridge across the Missouri River was built in Hannibal.

But for at least a decade, signs on the roads intersecting I-172 did not mention Quincy, instead mentioning Mount Sterling, Illinois, and Keokuk, Iowa. (The above is dated November 2002; replacements were up by October 2012.) The interstate reaches neither of those cities and in fact, they’re in two very different directions. Keokuk is the next largest city to the north, via IL 96; Mount Sterling is to the east, via US 24. In that way, I-172 was less a route to Quincy than a bypass of Quincy from I-72 to the routes to get to those cities.

Illinois has replaced all the signs in Clearview. Carthage and Macomb are the new destinations, which make much more sense from a corridor standpoint. Illinois has been upgrading an assortment of roads to four lanes between Galesburg and Quincy — US 34, US 67, US 136, and IL 94. Illinois wants to encourage traffic to use those highways (along with I-74 and I-88), and then US 36, between Chicago and Kansas City. The last part in the “CKC” corridor, the Macomb bypass, could be completed this year.

The state even went so far as to create a new number, 110, specifically to overlap the whole corridor. As far as I can tell, no one uses the number in an everyday manner, not even the state — the number shield is tacked on to larger signs at interchanges and never included in the main part. But Illinois is so into this “corridor” thing that there’s another number, 336, overlapping 110 and the previously-numbered routes between the north end of I-172 and Macomb. That’s the one that gets on the big signs. Illinois could’ve given more prominence to 110 and not dealt with 336 at all, but then, efficiency isn’t the state’s strong suit.

Although Keokuk never connected to I-172, for a time the city got more respect on signs in Illinois than it did in Missouri, which leaves it out of every interchange on the Avenue of the Saints until US 61 splits from the four-lane near the Iowa border.

If you haven’t been all focused on the caucuses, you may have noticed a few news articles about the DOT undergoing an all-encompassing study on I-80.

Right now, the study is about asking for input; it’s an “online public information meeting.” It starts with a survey online. The website has various moving parts so I’m linking to the main page and then going to cut out the middleman and link directly to the Public Involvement Plan PDF.

A long-term (and I mean loooong-term) plan to six-lane I-80 all the way between Des Moines and Davenport has to start somewhere, and this study/survey is the first step.

September 13, 2015: The exit sign for the new US 63 interchange with IA 3 is signed in Clearview. Note the “L”s especially, and how the lowercase letters aren’t that much shorter than the capitals. The interchange replaced a four-way stop when 63 was upgraded to four lanes between Waterloo and US 18/IA 346 in 2012.

The Federal Highway Administration officially terminated all use of the Clearview font on road signs last week. Stories available at Popular Mechanics (whose top photo, notably, has a sign that is not in Clearview) and CityLab.

The Iowa Department of Transportation stopped issuing new-sign contracts with Clearview about a year and a half ago. The new font is not identical to what was used in Iowa for decades before Clearview, though; it’s skinnier. All the existing Clearview signs can stay until they are replaced through natural wear and tear, which means that it will be with us for decades to come. The “genericization” of interchange signing in Iowa was done entirely in Clearview, so those will gradually progress to a mix depending on what exit you’re at.

(h/t Matt Stinn and Cristopher Sturtz)