Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The ramp from westbound US 20/southbound US 75 to southbound I-29 closed Tuesday for an estimated two months, KTIV reports. It’s for a bridge deck overlay and barrier replacement. The Iowa DOT’s signed detour takes travelers north on I-29 all the way to downtown Sioux City at the Floyd Boulevard exit, then back south on I-29. Ironically, a shorter detour would be to continue west on I-129 to the South Sioux City/Dakota City exit and turn around there, then exit from eastbound US 20/I-129 to southbound I-29 right after re-entering Iowa.

Drivers could also use Lakeport Street and Singing Hills Boulevard between the two freeways, but that’s not ideal for semis (or locations along those roads).

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.