The Iowa DOT is holding a hearing in Toledo on Thursday to discuss proposals for upgrading US 30 east of Tama.
What makes this hearing different from many of those in the past few years is that there will be a formal presentation along with the display of the environmental assessment. (I don’t know if that’s different from the EIS, perhaps an earlier stage.)
The hearing opens at 5 and the presentation is at 5:30.
July 30, 1999: This marker was seen on our tour of Gettysburg. (video frame)
Related articles:
A reading of the Gettysburg Address (NPR)
Thousands gather to commemorate 150th anniversary of Gettysburg Address (Fox News)
Ken Burns working on Gettysburg Address project (USA Today)
“Des Moines” as slang for “Middle America” strikes again:
Southern women are different. That is a fact. It is not posturing, or hyperbole, or marketing. (See: all those song lyrics about California girls and their undeniable cuteness.) Southern women, unlike women from Boston or Des Moines or Albuquerque, are leashed to history.
I think I’ll just furrow my brow at this and say “Bless your heart.”
(h/t Instapundit)
September 17, 2007
The second-to-last privately owned toll bridge on the Iowa part of the Missouri River is about to be free.
A story earlier this month from the Sioux City Journal (reprinted in the Lincoln Journal Star) said the Burt County Bridge Commission was preparing to turn the IA 175/NE 51 bridge over to their respective states, and a press release Friday from the Iowa DOT confirms the approval of the transfer. Nebraska will be in charge of most of the bridge maintenance.
Both items say Nov. 30 will be the last day tolls will be collected.
Six years ago, the US 34 bridge across the Missouri River was transferred from private ownership to Iowa and Nebraska but remains tolled. The IA 370 bridge is still privately owned.
For the second year in a row, the 1A final will be all-private (Fort Dodge St. Edmond vs. Iowa City Regina), and the 4A final will follow suit (Dowling vs. Xavier). The other private-school finalists are Don Bosco in 8-player, Carroll Kuemper in 2A, and Sioux City Heelan in 3A. Only Class A has four public schools in the semis.
This post has been edited.
Just mentally swap “today” for “tonight”. May also apply to Sunday’s basketball game.
March 18, 2004: This sign near Edgewood Road won’t be going anywhere for a while.
The Iowa DOT had an open meeting on IA 100 Wednesday in Cedar Rapids and put the plans online. KCRG has a news story about the meeting, embedded below.
The extension would be completed in two stages, from Edgewood Road (interchange rebuilt into a SPUI) to Covington Road (old IA 94) and then to US 30. There would be essentially two new interchanges built at the latter, with the current 16th Avenue end area torn up for flyover ramps. The whole thing would be finished in 2020, according to this latest plan, but that carries a tinge of “if everything goes right and without any more setbacks”. Early parts are in the current five-year plan, though.
This short item in the Carroll Daily Times Herald says the U.S. 30 Coalition will meet Friday in Nevada, but doesn’t say much else that hasn’t been mentioned elsewhere. Mainly it appears to say two things: The coalition will ask for more money, and the DOT director will explain why that won’t happen detail possible ways to raise money for road construction.
It’s interesting that the Carroll-Glidden segment is a four-lane priority. The road is already four lanes undivided from the east edge of Carroll, at County Road N33. But I suspect a lot of people commute on that road.
June 12, 2011: The Trump Tower, left, and Sears Tower, right, as seen from the observation floor of the John Hancock Building. Yes, I still call it the Sears Tower. So there.
Thanks to a goosing of the rules, and calling a glorified antenna a spire, New York’s new One World Trade Center will be considered the tallest building in the United States/Western Hemisphere when it is completed. (The CN Tower is the world’s tallest “freestanding structure”.)
This is the second time Chicago’s Sears/Willis Tower has lost its title on a technicality. The Petronas Towers usurped the overall “world’s tallest” when its spires were included. However, the Sears Tower retained the title of “highest occupied floor” until the Burj Khalifa was finished in 2010.
On a related note, I think the new building constructed in New York should’ve been called 3 World Trade, leaving 1 and 2 for the towers destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001. (The old complex also had buildings 3 through 7 but not of the same height.)
Why??
Among the October 2013 applications for the AASHTO Standing Committee on Highways, Special Committee on Route Numbering, were the reroutes of interstates in the St. Louis area for the new bridge, creating I-49 through Arkansas* (PDF), and a minor item from the Kansas Department of Transportation. KDOT wants to take US 40 off 6th Street in the west half of Lawrence and reroute it onto K-10. The change would take effect in April.
It sounds unassuming, until you look at the application (PDF). Kansas is going to take a highway that has a straightforward route through the city and shunt it onto a bypass, and then back north to rejoin the old route, which eventually runs north of I-70. The current distance on 6th Street between K-10 and US 59 is 4 miles; the new distance for US 40, co-signed around, with US 59, is 10.4 miles.
This doesn’t make sense. It takes some traffic off 6th and enables turnover to the city, but it doesn’t make any sense for the integrity of US 40 in that part of Kansas**. We can be thankful that KDOT is following the rules of not putting US highways on toll roads*** — if the Kansas Turnpike didn’t exist, it would be simple just to route 40 onto I-70 — but the fact the route is being noticeably lengthened and given a semi-circuitous route remains.
K-10 is a full freeway between Lawrence and the southwest part of metro Kansas City. The problem/issue with moving US 40 onto the near-entire alignment of K-10 is what happens in trying to get from the I-435/K-10 interchange back to existing US 40, which still has its own independent segment on the Missouri side of the metro far to the north. And I don’t think Missouri is keen on giving that up in order to put US 40 on I-435/I-470 on the south side of the metro over to Blue Springs, nor should it be.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have another reason to dislike the change in alignment: It breaks up my continuously traveled stretch of US 40 from Denver to the Illinois side of the St. Louis metro, a distance of some 880 miles. I’ll have to go back down some time.
*Good luck trying to get a four-lane controlled-access highway built through the Ouachita Mountains in the modern era. It’s going to take a while. Of more immediate nature is when will I-540 be re-signed as I-49, and how will the exit numbers be managed?
**West of Topeka, US 40 is pushed onto I-70 for 290 miles, so the integrity of 40 in Kansas is somewhat compromised already. But it’s signed well.
***Illinois, this means you, and what you did to US 51 north of Rockford.
