Highway Page Updates - 2001

December 23: Updates to Freeway Junctions:

• Not only did I extend the US 218/IA 27 south exit list to cover the Mount Pleasant bypass, but I also extended the US 34 list westward from West Burlington to Mount Pleasant despite the gap around Danville and Middletown.
• I added the new South Dakota Avenue interchange to the US 30 in Ames list and updated Exit 143 on the I-80 west list (IA 945 is posted on it now) after Jeff Morrison sent me info on how both exits are signed.
• I also updated the appropriate route listings to show the newly-extended exit lists, and for some reason, I forgot to list the New London expressway segment under the US 34 listing. It's there now.

December 19:

• The ribbon-cutting ceremony was last Friday, but most of the US 218/IA 27 bypass of Mount Pleasant opened today. The southbound lanes between the north interchange (current US 218/future US 34 west) and US 34 will not open until next spring. Both listings were updated; I will head down there this weekend to take photos, and I will probably extend the US 218 exit list southward from IA 92.
• More new terminus links, this time for IA 1, 3, 5, 24, 64, 107, 117, 122, 133, 150, 163, 220, former 223, 382, unsigned 432, and 927.
• Jeff Morrison also pointed out a few errors in the route listings -- IA 1's northern terminus was southwest of Anamosa (not southeast); IA 229's eastern terminus is at US 63, not IA 14; IA 245 (II) is now County Road E63; and IA 102 was slightly realigned after the IA 163 Pella bypass opened in 1994.

December 14:

• It's that time of the year again, so I put the Iowa Winter Road Condition Report link back on the Links page.
• I added terminus photo links for IA 22, 70, 103, 130, 386, 394, 405, and 965. I also updated the completion dates for some US 151 expressway segments after they were mentioned in the news recently.
• Also, Gary Stevenson e-mailed me recently with some info regarding the missing IA 402, a proposed four-lane road leading southward from Waterloo that never appeared on an official state highway map (which is why it wasn't listed here -- until now). He also stated that the former northern terminus of IA 413 was at the former IA 320 west of Badger; it was probably truncated at the Fort Dodge Airport when IA 320 was decommissioned.

December 8: Neil Bratney answers my call for Sioux City photos: he sent me ten photos from a recent road trip there, and they're on a new third Sioux City photo page.

December 2:

• Jeff Morrison recently launched a new page dealing with photos of Iowa highway endings, much like those at AARoads' Interstate Terminus Gallery and other sites. With that in mind, I added links from the highway listings that have terminus photos at this time -- IA 8, 21, 57, 58, 96, 175, 330, former IA 233, and former IA 412-- and updated the About page to reflect this addition. More are on the way -- I plan to send him some additional terminus photos and will update the listings once new terminus pages are added. On the same note I added links to all Interstate and US highways that end in Iowa to their appropriate terminus pages on AARoads', Dale Sanderson's, or Adam Froehlig's sites.
• While doing a photo shoot of endings in southern Benton County today, I discovered that the last two miles of IA 131 were recently turned over to Benton County and the city of Belle Plaine after recent reconstruction of this segment. That listing has been updated.
• I also rearranged the links on the Photo Gallery page while adding some more links to pages that contain Iowa highway photos.

November 21: Another expressway segment -- US 151 between IA 1 and Anamosa -- opened to traffic Monday.

November 19:

• The highly anticipated Sioux City bypass opened today; I updated the US 75 and US 20 listings to reflect this. (If you can get some photos, let me know!)
• Also, Jay Deetelm recently sent me four photos from Dubuque, which I added to the appropriate Photo Gallery page.

November 12: Many new additions to the Photo Gallery, particularly the Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Waterloo/Cedar Falls, Des Moines, Avenue of the Saints, and central Iowa Odds 'n' Ends pages. I replaced many photos on the first three pages with newer ones to show how IA 27 is signed, but in a few cases I kept the old ones for comparison purposes. I also added more photos of I-35/IA 5 and Mount Pleasant bypass construction.

November 10:

• Economic woes have caused the Iowa Transportation Commission to cancel or delay 32 more highway projects totaling some $200 million that were on the five-year plan. The aforementioned US 30 Mount Vernon/Lisbon bypass, the proposed Tama/Toledo bypass, and the US 18/71 bypass of Spencer are among the canceled projects, while many others were delayed by as much as three years from their projected completion dates. All affected listings have been updated; here's a story from the November 8 Des Moines Register about the cutbacks, including the complete list.
• The Sioux City bypass will open on Monday, November 19 -- but according to Tim Habeck, it won't be an extension of I-129 as a misc.transport.road poster reported last year. However, a new Business US 75 will be created from the old US 75. That listing will be updated once the bypass opens.

November 1: Two more bypass projects have been delayed due to changes in alignment and/or design: US 30 around Mount Vernon and Lisbon, and US 34 around Fairfield. (Contrary to news reports, IaDOT stated on October 26 that the endangered crawfish frog did not play a role in the Fairfield bypass' delay.)

October 22: A few updates to the route listings:

• State budget problems have caused IaDOT to delay several projects that had been listed on the state transportation plan as planning studies -- this includes a US 30 bypass of Denison and a US 61 bypass of Burlington as well as "super-2" upgrades to IA 1 between Washington and Iowa City, US 18 between Postville and McGregor, US 34 between Red Oak and Ottumwa, two segments of US 63 and US 71, IA 150 between Oelwein and Independence, and US 151 from Amana to Cedar Rapids. The major corridor projects have not been affected by the budget cuts, including the Avenue of the Saints and the I-235 reconstruction in Des Moines. (Here is a complete list of the affected projects as well as borderline projects that survived the cut.)
• I also updated the IA 27 listing to note that Missouri plans to follow suit by calling part of its Avenue of the Saints section MO 27, but Minnesota doesn't plan to, since there already is a MN 27. A front-page (Cedar Rapids) Gazette article from September 24 also noted that IA 394 will be no more after that segment is upgraded to four lanes; IA 27 will be the only number on that road.
• In addition, I changed the completion date of the US 151 bypass of Cascade to 2002; a trip up there yesterday showed that the road isn't even close to opening by the end of this year. I also found yet another four-digit county road in Delaware County: C60X between Edgewood and Greeley.

October 20: I added some new photos to the Mason City/Clear Lake, Waterloo/Cedar Falls, central Iowa Odds 'n' Ends, and north Avenue of the Saints pages from September road trips. These include the Iowa Highways Page's first photos of IA 27. I also contributed a couple of photos to Dale Sanderson's US highway endings page, and the least I could do is link to his site (and Adam Froehlig's US highway endings page) from the main Photo Gallery page.

October 15: J X noted in an e-mail that I missed a city on US 52 -- Calmar. It's there now.

September 30: I changed the e-mail address on all pages; e-mail should now be sent to j.hancock@mchsi.com.

September 16: Updates to Freeway Junctions:

• Since most of IA 27 has been signed by now, I updated the appropriate exit lists -- including I-380, US 218, and the Avenue of the Saints north lists.
• Also, part of the new I-35/IA 5 interchange near West Des Moines has opened, and signage has changed to reflect this. I updated both the I-35 and IA 5/US 65 lists while adding a link from the former to the latter.

September 15: I put a special message on the title page about the terrorist attacks of September 11.

September 8: I finally caught up on my backlog of photos and posted some new ones to the Photo Gallery.

• Mount Pleasant bypass photos are now on a new page, including some construction photos from my trip through there on July 31.
• Des Moines photos are now on two pages to save downloading time, with new photos on both pages.
• A third Odds and Ends page was created for southeast Iowa, covering areas south of I-80. The existing second Odds and Ends page now covers northeast and east-central Iowa, areas north of I-80. I added new photos to both pages.
• Finally, I added two new photos to the Quad Cities page.

August 31:

• Those empty brackets that have sprung up along I-380 and US 218 in the past month are about to be filled, and the trash bag-covered markers that some have seen in Cedar Rapids are about to be uncovered. IaDOT announced yesterday that the Avenue of the Saints will carry the IA 27 designation -- in addition to the highway numbers that already follow it -- with signage to be completed by the end of September. Although the signs haven't been uncovered yet, I've gone ahead and added the route listing while updating the listings for the highways that already make up the Avenue of the Saints. The exit lists and photo gallery will eventually be updated to include the new signs.
• I also fixed the Business US 218 heading (it had read "Business US 169" -- sorry about that) and updated the IA 100 listing to mention some recent events that have occurred.

August 24:

• Part of the US 151 expressway segment between Springville and a point west of IA 1 opened earlier this month. Work on the rest of the route toward Anamosa, including interchanges with IA 1 and IA 64 as well as a new Wapsipinicon River span, is still going on.
• I also deleted the "If you are coming from off-site..." disclaimers from the exit lists that had them; with the move of the site away from the frames of NBCi.com, I felt they weren't necessary anymore.

August 8: A new four-lane segment of US 61 opened between Fort Madison and US 218 near Montrose on August 1; that listing has been updated.

July 29: Kurt Berge e-mailed me with a couple of corrections recently:

• IA 356 appears on the 2001 state highway map after all -- no marker is there, but it's represented by a black smudge next to US 71 near West Okoboji.
• And there is a third four-digit county road in northwest Iowa: A54B in Lyon and Sioux counties.

July 23: I fixed the IA 40 listing to note that it was created from part of IA 14 in the 1920s.

July 20: The Matthew Salek Highway has moved to a new server, so I updated all of my links to his pages.

July 15:

• I tweaked with the title page setup a bit and added a route listing for the unsigned IA 356 (a former segment of US 71) in the Arnolds Park area that Mike Ehret e-mailed me with recently.
• I also added a photo of a recently restored World War White Way Memorial Highway marker in Davenport, courtesy of Vern Wriedt, to the Quad Cities page of the Photo Gallery.

June 29: Changes to Freeway Junctions:

• I created a new list (my shortest one yet): the IA 5/92 bypass of Knoxville. This is on a new page with the IA 141 list.
• I also made some minor updates here and there, including the construction of a new interchange with US 30 and South Dakota Avenue in Ames. With all lists, I fixed all the links to route listings on the Iowa Highways Page so they link to the /highways/ directory (which was one thing I forgot to change when I moved them to this server).

Also, at Iowa Highways, I added links to the IA 5 and IA 92 listings to reflect the new exit list and added a note on the title page that NBCi.com is going to shut down on July 15, so if you're a webmaster who is still linking to the old site addresses, please update your links now!

June 19: I made some long-overdue updates to the Photo Gallery, including a move of all of the individual photo pages from NBCi.com to Tripod. I also added many new photos from the first half of 2001 and updated captions on almost all of the pages. More Des Moines photos are coming soon.

June 17:

• I rearranged the list of state scenic byways on the Scenic and Historic Routes page so that they are all in alphabetical order; I added a note about when they were designated at the top of the page.
• After a trip up there last weekend, I noticed that the segment of IA 76 between the two intersections with US 18 is not posted at all except for the mile markers; the only reassurance markers along that segment are for Business US 18. I added a note about this to the two appropriate route listings.

June 6: Changes to the route listings:

• I added an entry for Business IA 92 in Knoxville after spotting it on a Memorial Day-weekend road trip through central Iowa.
• On that same trip, I found out that the western terminus of IA 85 was not at US 63, but rather at the east city limits of Montezuma. I looked at past Primary Road Sufficiency Logs to find out the dates when the appropriate segments of IA 85, IA 107 in Clear Lake, and IA 183 and IA 191 in Council Bluffs were turned over to their respective jurisdictions. At the same time I updated some alignment change dates for US 151, IA 57, IA 58, and IA 155 (I).

May 27: At Iowa Highways, I fixed the spelling of the name of the city which used to be the southern terminus of IA 139 -- Protivin. I also added info about the history of IA 57 and IA 58 from an e-mail that I received from Dennis Swanson.

May 14: I updated more highway designation and completion dates after doing some more research this weekend. This includes the addition of the short-lived first version of IA 271.

May 8: The US 61 bypass of Blue Grass opened last week to complete a four-lane link between Muscatine and Davenport.

May 1: Well, here it is. The new URL of the Iowa Highways Page has been announced and most of my pages have moved to new servers at North Liberty-based Internet Navigator. I am going to keep the individual Photo Gallery pages at NBCi.com for the time being due to this server's 15 MB limit. The redirects at the old site will remain until NBC pulls the plug -- in the meantime, please update your links! http://iowahighways.cjb.net

The Iowa Highways Page index is now the main page of Jason's Pad on the Web. The highway listings, county roads, scenic routes, and links pages are now located in the /highways/ directory. Freeway Junctions of the Heartland is still in /exits/ and the Photo Gallery title page is in /photos/; my personal page is now in the /jason/ directory. Consequently, http://iowahighways.cjb.net/exits/ can be used to access Freeway Junctions of the Heartland. None of the individual file names have changed.

Other site updates:

• I added comments on how I-35 and I-380 faced opposition by farmers in the 1970s over their diagonal routings.
• The IA 32 Southwest Arterial in Dubuque was given the okay by the Transportation Commission in April, and that listing has been updated.
• I also fixed the Scenic and Historic Routes page after the state highway map mentioned the names of two state scenic byways that were designated last year (the Driftless Area Scenic Byway and Old O'Brien Glacial Trail).
• At Freeway Junctions, I made a minor change to the I-380 exit list to reflect a supplementary signage change in Cedar Rapids.

April 14: I put the announcement on the title page that all of these pages will be moving to a new server, hopefully by the end of the month.

April 9: After finding some 1931 and 1932 highway maps this weekend, I updated several designation dates for many highways, particularly those between 158 and 249. I also added some short-lived alignments that were never listed before, including IA 130 (II) (replaced by US 30; the second of four different IA 130's), IA 181 (I) (replaced by IA 22), IA 187 (I), and IA 190 (I) (both replaced by IA 33, now IA 60).

March 28: I fixed the locations of the northern termini of IA 282 and IA 297 after noticing that they were not at the US 20 freeway as I had previously thought.

March 18: At Iowa Highways, I updated the Scenic & Historic Routes page to show which routes the new Allamakee County Scenic Byway follows. I also fixed a few broken links on the Links page, the Freeway Junctions title page, and individual exit lists.

February 25:

• At Iowa Highways, I updated some scheduled completion dates after the state's five-year plan was revised earlier this month. The most noteworthy changes involved a delay in the US 218 (Avenue of the Saints) expressway segment between Charles City and Plainfield from 2002 to 2003, delays in most of IA 60 to 2005, and the addition of the long-proposed IA 32 Southwest Arterial in the Dubuque area to the five-year plan.
• At Freeway Junctions, I fixed the above-mentioned US 218 completion dates on the Avenue of the Saints exit list. I also added the listing for a new I-35 exit near Osceola after seeing it listed in the printed version of the 2001 eXitSource (formerly the Interstate Exit Authority).

February 17:

• Several new photos have been added to the Photo Gallery, particularly on the Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Quad Cities, Avenue of the Saints, and first Odds 'n' Ends pages. With the additions, I have split the Cedar Rapids and Avenue of the Saints sections into two pages to save downloading time.
• Jason Watts also e-mailed me recently stating that the red street signs in Cedar Rapids represent private drives, not dead-ends and cul-de-sacs as I had previously stated. The caption under the Classic Car Court photo (now on the first Cedar Rapids page) which stated that has been updated.

January 27: I fixed a typo on the Freeway Junctions title page (IA 141's list begins at IA 144, not IA 141), and corrected a couple of outside links as well.

January 24: I fixed the link to Robert Droz' US highways page from the links page after it was moved again.

January 16: The third segment of the IA 5 bypass opened on Friday, January 12, and I made it out to the Des Moines area last Sunday to check it out. The IA 5 route listing and exit list have been updated. Other noteworthy items:

• A new half-interchange has opened on I-235 in West Des Moines, so I added that and fixed a couple of other things on the exit list. I also created a new list for the IA 141 expressway segment between Perry and I-35/80, and updated the I-35, western I-80, US 30 in Ames, and US 30 in Marshalltown lists.
• IA 931 and IA 945 are signed after all. Those listings have been updated, complete with route markers.
• Speaking of I-235, IaDOT is going to delay the start of reconstruction to the spring of 2002 after finding out that it will cost $46 million more than originally planned. I have linked to a series of Des Moines Register online articles from the I-235 listing.

January 7: It took a little longer than I thought, but the new and (hopefully) improved route listings have been uploaded to coincide with the Iowa Highways Page's third anniversary. Among the features:

• A new look for the title page's table of contents, with the moving of an expanded Links section to a separate page.
• A new sky-blue background color (like this one) for the route listing and title pages
• A new table-based format for the route listings; active routes are in white tables with green headings, while decommissioned routes are in light gray cells with dark gray headings
• Improved route marker graphics (you may have noticed that I uploaded some of them in late December), including route markers for 900-series routes which appear on the 2000 state highway map
• Route listings for state highways have been divided into groups of 25 numbers per page.
• Each incarnation of a decommissioned route -- e.g., the four different versions of IA 134 -- has its own route listing, using Roman numerals to distinguish among them. If an active state highway has had separate incarnations in the past, they are listed before the active highway's listing.
• Highway lengths are given in both miles and kilometers
• The two termini of each route are listed on separate lines for all routes, including spurs off a state highway and decommissioned routes
• All active routes now have "History" sections, even if they are little more than the year that the route was designated. For decommissioned routes, the years of designation and decommissioning are listed along with the highways that replaced them.

Most of the same tidbits that have been here for the past three years are still around, albeit in a slightly different format. The route listing tables should be viewable with both Netscape and Internet Explorer with only marginal differences, since I tested them in Netscape 4.7 and IE 4.0. Please e-mail me if you run into any problems.

Meanwhile, a couple of news items to report: The IA 5 freeway segment to the south of Des Moines was scheduled to open in December, but heavy snowfall after heavy snowfall delayed the opening. IaDOT is going to try to open the road in mid-January -- weather permitting, of course. Meanwhile, on December 27, IaDOT announced that it wants to turn over more than 800 miles of state-maintained highways to local jurisdictions in what could be the biggest mass decommissioning since 1980. (State law, however, prohibits them from willingly turning over the roads; they have to reach a deal with the county or city where the state pays for improving the roads to a reasonable service level.) Their complete list is here.

2000 updates

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