Third and Fourth streets in downtown Davenport are one-way streets, and the city council is looking into eliminating those, reports WQAD.
This would not affect the north-south one-ways on Brady and Harrison streets carrying Business 61.
Cedar Rapids has approved a plan to get rid of many one-way streets in downtown over the next five years. (PDF map) The trade-off on that, though, is that quite a few intersections with stoplights would be converted to all-way stops.
After years of public meetings and study, the US 65/IA 330/IA 117 intersection in Jasper County will be upgraded to an interchange. The interchange will be northeast of the current intersection and both the present intersection and the F17 intersection will be closed.
The DOT has created an explanatory PDF (with interchange diagram) and a memorandum on traffic control options to back up a decision that has been vocally protested by the landowner who will be most affected.
A major bridge that carried Route 66 traffic for a while near St. Louis, the westbound I-270 Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge, was partially imploded today.
The Chain of Rocks Canal Bridge — not the one over the Mississippi River, but to the east in Illinois — had a replacement built last year. From the mid-1960s until 1979, the pair of spans carried US 66 as well. (US 66 was truncated to Joplin in 1979.)
The canal bridge that connects to the old Chain of Rocks Bridge is still alive and well.
Another piece of Route 66 history was lost last year when the vehicle deck was removed from the MacArthur Bridge in downtown St. Louis. You can see the old Missouri approach and the decking in the Google Maps satellite view.
These stories from KWWL and KCRG cover two separate things — the 80/380 cloverleaf and a potential exit at Forevergreen Road in North Liberty — but they have a common thread in location and timeline.
Under the most recent five-year plan, the Forevergreen Road exit would be built in 2019, and the first new exit on I-380 since its completion. Work on converting I-80/380 from a cloverleaf to a more advanced interchange would start the year before.
Six-laning of I-380 is not a part of those plans, but those two projects will make travel between Cedar Rapids and Iowa City more complicated.
The certified enrollment numbers for Iowa’s public school districts were released at the end of last week. While the total is slightly up from last year, the bulk of that growth is concentrated in the state’s largest districts.
Ankeny and Waukee continue to show no signs of slowing down. Those two districts alone account for half of the statewide net gain. In fact, Waukee’s growth is equivalent to North Tama’s entire enrollment. North Tama is among the 60 percent of districts with enrollment under 600 that lost students.
To get the combined student increase of Ankeny (444) and Waukee (484), counting up solely from districts that added students this year (starting with +1), you would need to count about 100 districts. Only 18 districts that were the same in area last year and this year added more than 100 students, period.
One of those adding more than 100 was Bondurant-Farrar, another suburban Des Moines district. In one decade, B-F has gone from the state’s 101st-largest district to the 54th-largest. The Bluejays have hit the jackpot, in more ways than one.
Meanwhile, in rural districts, the slide continues. There are six this year with fewer than 160 students. One (Corwith-Wesley) will not exist next school year, and two others (Prescott and Walnut) may be on borrowed time. Des Moines has more students than Iowa’s 100 smallest districts combined; Ankeny, about the bottom 46 combined. Only seven of the 25 smallest districts that existed when the Class of 2015 started kindergarten will be around for their graduation.
The below graph counts student enrollment for all Iowa districts outside the top 11 (those with enrollment above 7500). As you can see, this data set tells a different story. It has the same small uptick as the state at large, but the overall decline in the first decade of the century is very visible.
July 11, 2004: This Jefferson Highway turn stone has been placed on the interpretive walking trail at the Reed-Niland corner in Colo. Photo taken on day of dedication of renovated Niland station.
Earlier this month, the Osceola Sentinel reported the city council there supports marking the Jefferson Highway, or Pine to Palm, as an Iowa heritage byway. The centennial of the Jefferson Highway is next year. In Iowa, it followed US 69 south of Ames and US 65 north of Colo (and the Lincoln Highway in between).
I am not aware of any comprehensive log of the Jefferson Highway’s earliest route(s) in the state, unlike the Lincoln which has been well-documented in the past 20 years. Deviations from the current routes in Iowa that I can think of offhand would include:
More on this as the applications progress, hopefully.
Cross country US 20 traveler Bryan Farr made such an impression on a small Woodbury County town last June that they invited him back this summer. Cushing now has the Old 20 Community Development Corporation.
I tagged along that day, helping explore old pavement and a really really rough Correctionville Road. In two years I tackled significant lengths of three old highways in Iowa: End to end on the Lincoln Highway, the Newton-to-Iowa-City segment of the River-to-River Road, and old US 20 in assorted segments. Perhaps other towns can be inspired by Farr’s much greater work in promoting the old highway.
Our very own Christy Calderwood was crowned the 2015 Iowa Pork Queen tonight in Des Moines! pic.twitter.com/oddz0OWjWw
— North Tama HS (@NTRedhawks) January 29, 2015
Iowa has been the only state with a pork queen for more than two decades.
One of Iowa’s oldest interchanges is on its way out.
IA 415 in Polk County between Des Moines and Ankeny was upgraded to four lanes, with a grassy median, in two stages: Broadway to Northeast 54th Avenue in 1959, and from there to the old Y-intersection with IA 160 in 1961. (A very short piece that goes under the railroad tracks and past the then-brand-new Firestone tire plant became four lanes as World War II was winding to a close.)
Included in that 1961 upgrade was a full diamond interchange with Northeast 66th Avenue. Half a century later, that interchange with its small underpass and short ramps is going to be removed. It will be replaced with a standard intersection with traffic signals. The DOT will hold a meeting about the project Feb. 5, but the plans are already online.
Ironically, although that part of IA 415 is one of the oldest rural non-interstate four-lanes in Iowa, US 69/Northeast 14th Street just to the east remains two lanes to this day. (Why did that not change at least 20 years ago? It’s baffling.)
The state’s annual Condition of Education Report (PDF) was issued last week and has plenty of statistics. One being brought up often in news articles is the increased number of minority students, although if you look in the charts (p. 11) the percentage is much higher in the state’s 11 largest districts (enrollment 7500-plus).
Here are two other notable statistics that, along with the one above, says more about the condition of overall enrollment:
• At the beginning and end of a 25-year period, from 1988-89 to 2013-14, public school enrollment increased less than one-half of 1 percent (476,771 to 478,921). (p. 3)
• In 2013-14, 44 percent of Iowa’s school districts educated 12 percent of Iowa’s school children. Those districts have a certified enrollment under 600. Nearly one-third (31.4 percent) of K-12 students are in the state’s largest 11 districts. (p. 5)