Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

West Broadway (US 6) and North 16th Street (IA 192) in Council Bluffs will cease to be part of the Iowa highway system within a year, as the city council has approved a “memorandum of understanding” to take over the roads. The DOT has proposed giving the city $20 million, but a transfer of jurisdiction has not been finalized. The state will be in charge of snowplow duties this winter, so April 1 is probably the earliest date this can happen.

About a month ago, right before the Iowa U.S. Route 6 Tourist Association drove across the state, Iowa Public Radio interviewed the filmmakers who made a movie about the highway. David Darby, who’s behind the Iowa chapter of the US 6 group and has done research and photography on the highway, was also interviewed.

The interview is 48 minutes long.

There are two significant closures on the Great River Road route in southeast Iowa with little or no detour signage.

One is a recent development that threatens to become long-term. The road just southeast of Montrose was washed out earlier this year. No detours have been posted. If you approach from the south, there is no easy point to turn around. You have to go three miles back to 320th Street to get any road heading west to US 61/218, and five miles back to J82 to get a paved road. The Montrose police chief has been issuing tickets to drivers caught in the barricaded section.

Lee County should set up a detour for X28 (the designation for the GRR between Keokuk and Montrose) via J82, US 62, and J72 (old IA 404) — or at the very least put up a “No access to Montrose” sign at the Sandusky corner. Great River Road travelers will miss the Galland School marker, but would at least know they can get to it and will have to turn around.

The second development happened six-plus years ago: The bridge carrying Main Street across Cascade Ravine south of downtown Burlington, commonly called the “Cascade Bridge”, is permanently closed to vehicles (and now also to pedestrians) due to age and failing condition. There are signs that warn “Downtown Traffic use Madison and Harrison”, but the GRR arrows still direct into the park and to the closed bridge.

In both cases, I believe the scenic byway signs should be changed until repairs are made to both segments.

There are parts of an old routing of US 52 just east of its south junction with US 61/151 on the south side of Dubuque. One portion, Bellevue Heights Road, was bypassed in the 1930s and now has the E.B. Lyons Interpretive Center on it. The other is a little extension of that that wasn’t bypassed until the 1950s, and now looks out of place. It does not appear to be closed in the most recent aerial photo (below), but time and the Dubuque County supervisors* have caught up with it.

The bridge construction is a style common to the era, reinforced concrete with a little bit of shaping to the pillars lining each side. It still has a nice plaque in the middle. Now that the bridge has been closed, the question is if it will be torn down or left in place. Photos taken Sept. 16.

*The supervisors’ website requires enabling of pop-ups to view PDFs. Bad form.