Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

Weeks after the 2015 RAGBRAI route was announced in March, the finalized route in and out of Coralville was added to the map. On the Saturday morning of the ride, bicyclists will go past “the corner of Melrose and Melrose” to see Kinnick Stadium and then the Old Capitol. (No word on if there will be donation jars for Kirk Ferentz’s buyout.) This route will also eliminate any ambiguity over whether University Heights has been visited by RAGBRAI.

The route inside Cedar Falls remains ambiguous, but with the University of Northern Iowa prominently figuring in the city’s RAGBRAI website and an exit via Hudson Road, passing by the UNI-Dome wouldn’t be hard to do.

Here’s my list of every town visited by every RAGBRAI.

Two months later than expected, the official state transportation map is available through iowadotmaps.com. Changes are minimal, but Tama County had a few of them.

• The Iowa Juvenile Home is no longer marked.
• The Tama-Toledo “urban area” is no longer extant (no yellow area).
• T69 north of D65 is marked as paved, although it’s hard to tell because the lettering itself takes up most of the line. So is A26 in Allamakee County.
• IA 152, IA 370, and old US 34 to Plattsmouth are now county roads.
• IA 92 is rerouted around Muscatine both on the main map and inset.
• N64 to Athelstan in Taylor County, long marked as paved and marked as bituminous in a 1997 county map, is gravel. The road itself been gravel since at least fall 2009, as seen on Google Street View. It’s very possible this was a reversion in the 2000s, after the community disincorporated.
• Speaking of disincorporation, Millville’s new status is so reflected.
• One piece of the past hanging around: Old IA 60 at the Minnesota state line still appears as a black line, although the road literally was obliterated after completion of the four-lane.

The state will be switching to an every-two-years pattern on paper maps. This KCRG story leads me to think that 2015 is the first two-year printed map. (That may also explain the delay.) Printing maps in odd-numbered years would best sync with changes in the governor’s office.

You know how, when new products come out that are worse than the old ones, or are incompatible, or are inextricably linked with “the cloud”, or just plain don’t do what the old one does, the rebuttal is “you don’t have to use it”?

Well, here’s another piece of evidence against that rebuttal, because eventually, you don’t have a choice:

Soon, the updated version of Google Maps will become your desktop Maps experience. You’ll no longer be able to use the older, classic Google Maps.

The classic Google Maps, i.e., the one that works. The one without zillions of squares. The one that lets me type “from: CID to: la crosse wi to: mankato mn to: CID”, knows exactly what I mean, and creates a route accordingly. The one that doesn’t suck up the CPU to zoom in on Street View. And the one that works in Safari for Mac OS 10.6.8. As of Tuesday, GMaps defaults to “lite” mode, but chews up CPU cycles and no longer has zoom levels on the scale, just plus/minus.

For the moment, iPhoto Places appears to be unaffected (but still has the long-standing map-jumping issue). If anything happens to that I’m going to be furious.