August 6, 2005: I-74 near Peoria between two interstate junctions in a row, I-474 and I-155. The semi is from a company in Winfield, Iowa. An interstate intersecting two other interstates consecutively is pretty rare. In the Midwest, I-55 has a partial interchange between I-44 and I-64/70, while the Kansas City alphabet loop has intervening ramps all over the place.
From KWWL. (I’ve attempted to embed the video. Otherwise click the link.)
Since the opening of the New Hampton bypass, this was one of two four-way stops, and the only stopping points on US 63, between MN 16 in Spring Valley and the Airline Highway stoplight on the north side of Waterloo. (The other is IA 9.) This is a great development for US 63 travelers — although the morass of stoplights through all of Waterloo remain.
May 25, 2003: The now-defunct gas station on V18 at I-80 south of Brooklyn. It was in business just long enough to get rebranded to BP — that’s why I took the picture, Standards were rare anyway — but closed soon after. And to think I worried when gas was climbing toward $2… The early 2000s pictures that happen to capture gas prices are downright depressing now. (That’s another photo essay, perhaps.)
Odds appear good this won’t be repeated.
As previously discussed here and elsewhere, “new” license plates started to be issued this week. The key to the “new” part here is that this also applies to people who have kept the same plates since the late 1990s. This only covers three-quarters of the first cycle, though. Because the original issuance started Jan. 2, 1997, January through March (or April, if renewed early) registrants will hold on to theirs one more year. Based on experience, through the end of the calendar year it will be plates approximately through the mid-E’s.
Next year will be the big switch. Not only will the 1998-2003 replacement cover about half the alphabet (through the M’s at least), but all of the stamped plates like the one above will be part of it. The stock will go a little faster than the first time around, because U and V did not get kept in as options after the original sets went out to the counties.
The Gazette article also answers another question: Drivers may keep the old ones. (It would take a great deal of space, though, to collect one of each three-letter sequence.)
What is more concerning, perhaps, is the plan to have a “10-year replacement cycle.” Theoretically, that means this could go on for another 15 years — probably a little less given an increased number of vehicles — until we get to ZZZ999, and then reverse again and continue indefinitely. Are we going to be stuck with the same design for a quarter of a century? If so, that’s kind of a shame. It’s not the biggest thing in the world, but I think a redesign every once in a while, if not at least once in a decade, is a good thing.
One final thought: We don’t appear to have reached 999ZZZ yet. It’s possible a driver with an A/B/C/E plate could renew this year and bookend the series.
UPDATE: Here’s the verbatim press release (vs. the mixed news story/press release from the Gazette). It includes this:
This design remains within the recommended standards for license plate function and legibility, and the Iowa DOT plans to retain and use this design well into the future.
So yes, we will be stuck with this design for a quarter-century.
My eighth-grade algebra and ninth-grade geometry teacher will be the first principal at Ankeny’s new high school.
In other news, I’m feeling old again.
August 5, 2010: I left this picture big so you can see the “Oklahoma” inside the oddly shaped interstate shields. This is on I-40 approaching the east end of the multiplex. US 270 is hidden here.
The welcome center at the World’s Largest Truck Stop replaces the one that closed in LeClaire.
The move is actually beneficial for travelers because now no matter how you come in to the Quad Cities, there is an eastern Iowa I-80 welcome center available.
I’ve been looking for county information for a new project (great, but shouldn’t you be working on your old ones? -Ed.) and found that the Iowa Association of Counties digitized a book with a few paragraphs and important dates in each county’s early history. (The “%20″s in the link are spaces. Bad HTML form.) There is also a PDF version of the whole book, published in 1992.
There are some neat little gems in there. I was amused by this one from Ringgold County: “Then in 1884 a large brick building was completed from bricks made and fired in this county. … Inferior brick and lack of drain tiles caused such large cracks that it was condemned as unsafe in 1921.”
And Wright County: “In an 1890 election the voters approved the building of a new courthouse and jail. When the results were released to the public there was much celebrating done. Some of the residents of Clarion were so excited that they soaked the jail in oil and set it on fire.”
August 3, 2010: In the 1990s and 2000s, Missouri upgraded MO 152 to be a four-lane connector between I-29 and I-35 on the north side of Kansas City, but south of the airport. The use of Topeka as a control city is a little sleight of hand: MO 152 ends at I-435, 4 miles from the Kansas border, but MO 152/I-435/I-70 is a good way for Topeka/eastern Kansas traffic to get to I-35 without going through downtown.
Fifteen years ago, give or take a few months, I set up my first live website. For the first five years, I didn’t do much with it, setting up a few pages about the Titanic movie (!) and a couple road odds-and-ends but not much else.
In November 2001, I set up Iowa Highway Ends there, and in short order it became large enough that I exceeded the 20 MB (!) limit and needed a second sub-site. Soon, I had to start storing photos on my iDisk, requiring a manual re-edit of many pages to create absolute links.
A few years ago, I decided to move everything exclusively to my iDisk, after Angelfire’s interface failed to change. It was more efficient.
But then, last year, Apple lowered the boom. Join iCloud! Apple says. Except there’s one problem — probably because now that everyone uses templates or third-party sites (or, sigh, Facebook) to hold all their pictures and do their page work for them, Apple decided against a web-hosting service.
So ninety days from now, everything at homepage.mac.com/jeffmorrison — more than a decade’s worth of stuff — disappears forever. It might be the biggest purge of the Internet since Yahoo closed Geocities.
That’s why this website was created.
I think I’ve moved everything, and notified everyone I can think of, but there’s only one way to be sure. That’s where the self-imposed “link rot” comes in. The Angelfire pages have remained up, but the accumulation of minor edits to all of them have resulted in un-updated, or worse inaccurate, information.
So today I took a big step. I logged in to Angelfire for the first time in a really long time and found a new interface … that I won’t be interfacing much with. And, in the sub-site, I batch-deleted file after file, files that took untold hours to upload but seconds to go away.
I’m already having second thoughts, but it is one of those things that should be done. In a week or two I’ll go in and delete a chunk again, and hope that everyone who gets a 404 will be able to point to this place.
