For the summer of 2026, US 30 between US 63 and IA 21 is serving as a detour route for US 63. Two summers from now, it will flip to being a detour route for IA 21. A meeting in Belle Plaine on Thursday will go over the future project.
IA 21 from the south side of Belle Plaine to a mile north of IA 212 will be closed in 2028. The Iowa DOT will raise the grade of the roadbed and construct new bridges and culverts over the Iowa River to match.
The DOT at its May meeting approved a batch of RISE grants. These “Revitalize Iowa’s Sound Economy” awards are for construction that isn’t necessarily on roads on Iowa’s highway system, but will contribute to economic development.
One of the grants is for a roundabout on the east side of Perry. A map with a Radio Iowa story shows the intersection in question to be the one of IA 141 and Willis Avenue, which is pre-bypass 141. While this is the east edge of town, this is also where the expressway from Des Moines ends, and there are multiple intersections just between Willis and IA 144.
The press release mentions Soumas Avenue, which is the north-south road running from the junction with Willis south of 141…
…right?
Writing up this blog post has revealed an inconsistency between the DOT’s city map of Perry and the word on the street. On the map, the short north-south road is Soumas Drive, a short east-west road is Soumas Avenue, and another road running south is Nolan-Carney Drive. However, in Google Street View, the road intersecting IA 141 is Soumas Avenue, the east-west road just to the south is Nolan-Carney Drive (which Google calls “Nolan and Carney Drive”), and the road running south to the industrial park is Research Drive.
The DOT’s city map, dated 2022, needs to be updated anyway because it doesn’t have an extremely recent annexation by Perry just to the southeast for the new JBS Sausage plant, which is part of the reason for the need for more traffic control. (How extremely recent? Google’s base satellite view doesn’t show preliminary earth-moving while the Dallas County assessor’s interactive map does.) Also, in 2022 the land at the intersection that will become the roundabout wasn’t annexed either, and now there’s a Casey’s in the southwest corner of the intersection.
So, whenever the DOT updates its city map of Perry — ideally before the roundabout is finished in 2028 — there are some street names that need fixing.
(I would like to know why Radio Iowa’s website keeps giving me 403 Forbidden errors.)
Officially, US 34 between Chariton and Albia has been closed to thru traffic since April 27 for a concrete overlay. The construction is from Albia west to near the Melrose corner.
The detour runs up IA 14 to Knoxville, then down IA 5 to Albia. The only paved cutoff that would shave time off that is G76 in southern Marion County.
The Illinois Department of Transportation is the lead agency on replacement of the Centennial Bridge, US 67 across the Mississippi River. There will be an open house on May 20 from 3 to 6 PM at the Holiday Inn in Rock Island on the corridor study, the Illinois DOT says, in a press release reprinted by the Iowa DOT. The bridge, built in 1940, is the most traveled structurally deficient bridge in the state.
Materials from the first two meetings are available online. There are four non-replacement options on the table: Default no-build (obviously not acceptable), rehabilitation (addresses some issues but not all), a parallel twin structure combined with rehabilitation, and reconstruction, which involves taking apart the entire superstructure while widening the concrete piers in the river.
Replacement options are down to two. One is slightly downstream and parallel to the present bridge. The other is completely different, coming straight off 11th Street in Rock Island and running virtually true north-south across the river, spilling onto Marquette Street in Davenport. This plan would require using 2nd Street between Marquette and Gaines streets to get back to the Gaines connection to River Drive.
A press release from the Iowa DOT says that starting next week, the ramp from northbound (westbound) US 218 to southbound IA 58 will close until late July. The detour involves going north on 218 to the Lone Tree Road exit and then turning around.
The biggest impact from this is for people going from the Waterloo airport to Cedar Falls.
I spent “spring break” going museum-ing in two cities and doing heavy research in Des Moines. This is the last weekend for the Green Book exhibit in Omaha, but the rest of the Durham Museum is a must-see any time.
(Medical issues have severely infringed on my quality of life the past few months, so I have not been able to do much in the way of anything that isn’t scheduled ahead of time, and I’m doing everything I can just to get my Substack stuff out. That’s what happens when you can’t fall asleep until after 4 AM. I beg forgiveness.)
When the U.S. Army built Fort Madison, the first fort on the west side of the Mississippi River, the Native American tribes in the area took notice. Chief Black Hawk was the leader of one of those tribes. Through his autobiography — dictating his life story to a translator — he confirmed what the U.S. Army reported: There was a ravine to the west of the fort that could not be cleared, and attacks that led to the fort’s abandonment during the War of 1812 sprang from there.
An archaeological dig in 2009 discovered artifacts that give us a pretty good idea of where that ravine was.
How hard could it be to trace a highway that, for the most part, is effectively barred from moving eastward because of the Mississippi River? Turns out, very. The flow of IA 99 between Davenport and Clinton changes channels much like the Missouri River did on the other side of Iowa, or the Lower Mississippi River. Here’s what I know, working south to north, in an expanded version of the IA 99 (1920) page.
Consider the condition of early 20th century roads and autos, and then consider driving to/from a narrow bridge with that kink at left there. (USDA photo, ca. 1938)
I’ve seen a lot of QQ plates out there and I got SO close when I spotted a QQP, but I have yet to see a true QQQ out in the field. I assume there are a thousand of them out there somewhere, unless the state decided that they’d serve as a functional advertisement for the Invesco QQQ exchange-traded fund.
Nah, I’m probably overthinking this way too much. At the least, a QQQ would be neat.
There’s a little detour to get around the future roundabout at old 30, and then there’s this project. US 63 from the north end of Toledo to just south of the IA 96 junction is going to be pulverized to bits and the entire roadbed rebuilt. The new version will have redone turn lanes at the Garwin corner, which now is home to an elevator complex and a John Deere dealership. There will also be multiple passing lanes instead of just the one at the intersection with the sign for the Lincoln Historic Marker.
The closure begins Monday and will last through October. Traffic coming east from Gladbrook that wants to get to 63 is officially detoured to Traer, making the east-west section of 63 both “southound” and “detour northbound”. Signage could be interesting.
The official detour uses IA 8, IA 21, and US 30 all the way to the east end of Tama County. Perhaps if work is divided at the E29 intersection, part of that can be relocated/shortened. Otherwise, just like the detours of the Depression era, there are gravel options. They’re just unofficial.
