Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

October 9, 2015: US 12/20/45 share the road for a while on Mannheim (not Steamroller) Road.

In October I went after one of the more prominent missing segments in my highway travels: US 20 between Rockford and about Portage, Indiana. I felt an urge/obligation to do it because 20, of course, goes through Iowa, and is one of the major highways of the country.

I never intend to do that again, especially within an hour and a half of rush hour. Let’s just say, mistakes were made, and attempting to drive US 20 through the Chicago area should only be done if at all on a Sunday.

FORTY-FIVE MINUTES TO GO TEN MILES HOW DO YOU PEOPLE LIVE LIKE THIS

There’s no place like home.

I have now traveled all of US 20 from US 81 to the Indiana/Ohio line, at least until the new four-lane is built in western Iowa.

November 21, 2012: Well, this sign on new 20 didn’t last long. It will be replaced with one reading “North 71 South 471 / Storm Lake / Early”.

Iowa Highway 196 probably died today. [OR NOT: see bottom] The highway running north from US 71/IA 175 to the new US 20 east was undergoing reconstruction all year, to make way for US 71 to take over its route and then follow US 20 to Early. The detour originally projected to end the day before Thanksgiving was extended to Christmas Eve.

Taking over old 71 from Early south to IA 175 will be a new number, IA 471. It will be by far the highest-signed number in the field in Iowa, overtaking IA 415. I disagree with the decision, since Iowa has plenty of two-digit numbers sitting around unused, including every one in the 40’s except 44 and 48. IA 36 was nearby in Wall Lake. But it does provide a continuity of sorts with US 71, and that’ll aid the GPSs that don’t get updated.

Since it’s a new designation, by my rules, I now haven’t traveled every highway in Iowa. I’ll also need to go sometime and get pictures at both ends of the new highway, of course — a highway that’s two hours farther away from me than it used to be.

UPDATE 12/28: Jason Hancock says the construction report now says the road will be open during the winter but permanent pavement on the shoulders won’t be done until next spring, possibly delaying the change in signs.

January 30, 2012: This sign on I-35 in Texas could have an interstate shield in its future, I-14, running west along US 190 to Fort Hood.

Embedded in the five-year highway bill recently signed into law is designation of more national high-priority corridors. One mainly follows US 190 in Texas, but if you look at a map, that highway is anything but straight. Through the same congressional subterfuge that gave us Interstate 99, the corridor in Texas will be named Interstate 14. The number is in the right place, between I-10 and I-20, and in the far far future an interstate could extend eastward to Montgomery, Alabama. There’s another designation in the law too, Interstate 11 between Las Vegas and Reno. (Of course that will never ever come to fruition, but remember who the Senate Minority Leader is.)

(By the way, do you know we have an Interstate 2 now? It’s about 47 miles long in the southernmost part of Texas, running west from Harlingen to where development peters out. It puts a big hurdle in my desire to have at least a little of every interstate west of the Mississippi, that’s for sure.)

However, there are only about 30 miles of US 190 that are interstate-grade today, between Fort Hood and I-35 in Tyler, Texas. I happened to drive it in 2012, but wouldn’t count it as interstate mileage because it wasn’t signed as an interstate then. That’s the piece that could get new shields in the next 18 months. I-14 would not be the shortest two-digit interstate (that’s I-97 between Annapolis and southern Baltimore) and it lives up to the formal name of the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (much like I-185 in Georgia goes to not just Columbus but Fort Benning).

The agencies that are supposed to be in charge of numbering are the Special Committee on US Route Numbering and the Federal Highway Administration. Their track record recently hasn’t been the best as far as roadgeeks like myself are concerned. (North Carolina, in particular, needs some sense slapped into it.) Whether you think I-69 is pork-barrel spending gone mad or a necessary addition to our transportation system, the number is a monstrosity going where it shouldn’t and then splitting into suffixed routes southwest of Houston. The I-69 designation also was written into law as part of a highway spending bill.

The numbering committee meets during conferences of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), which recently elected Iowa DOT Director Paul Trombino as its president. As a perk of that office (or at least I presume it’s a perk), the AASHTO spring 2016 conference will be in Des Moines. It’s meant for transportation bigwigs in the public and private sectors, but I wondered if there would be a way to go as a private citizen… and then I saw the registration fees. Yowza.

Speaking of I-69, another long section of already existing freeway in Kentucky has been designated as I-69, and Indiana now has completed the interstate from Evansville to Bloomington. The University of Indiana in Bloomington was the last in the Big Ten not to have an interstate connection ever since State College was reached by — and here’s where the blog post finishes circling around itself — I-99.