I remember as an intern, a vet told us that if you went through Carroll at a specific speed, you would never stop at a light. We tried it, and it worked.
Worst Iowa Town / City to drive through?
- Thread starter Beernuts
- Start date
About 7-10mph over the speed limit was the perfect speed. However, they changed the light sync a few years ago. Don't drive the route enough anymore to have the new pace figured out.
Dubuque using Highway 20, especially close to Best Buy and all of that.
North/South isn't too bad.
Actually if you don't take the interstate driving through C.R. can be kind of a pain in the ass. Towns shaped by water can be tricky.
North/South isn't too bad.
Actually if you don't take the interstate driving through C.R. can be kind of a pain in the ass. Towns shaped by water can be tricky.
That's true for nearly any stretch through a town that has a lot of lights in a row if they're timed up accordingly.
CR just doesn't seem to have any reasoning to the way it is laid out in the first place. Downtown is one ways, unless they decide that 4 block should be two ways.
Like too many other cities, CR has zero foresight. By allowing retail right on top of everything, they've forced everything down a small set of atrial roads.
It's actually not too bad to get through town anymore. I remember a few years back it was borderline impossible to get through town without hitting almost every light. After they changed the sync, it's not too hard to get through town unstopped if no one turns. Any kind of left turn messes the whole thing up, though.
Polk City. The cops there are totally anal. You go 48 in a 45 zone, you're in trouble.
Another problem with Dubuque is if you are trying get from HWY 20 to HWY 151 and vice versa. Your options are either going all the way downtown to where they eventually meet or cut across residential areas. Although they are building a road that will connect the highways farther west, but that still about a year way.
I haven't driven through most of those towns much but since moving to Phoenix I have an entirely different concept of what 'a pain to drive' means. Just know that there are no bad drives in Iowa, unless something unusual has traffic extra gummed up.
Osage has 3 lights. Granted, it's probably 2 more than they really need, but still. Not enough to complain about. Decorah doesn't seem bad at all to me, probably because it is spread out, and the lights are far enough apart to get up to speed.
Waukon and Cresco are pretty easy, all things considered. Waukon only has one light through the business district, and you can completely avoid town if you need to, and Cresco only has two, but 75% of the business district is off the highway, and that traffic isn't on top of each other.
New Hampton is the worst in NE IA, IMO. There's like 7 or 8 stop lights in a town of 3400 people. You can bypass it now if you're coming through on 63, but east/west traffic still comes through town. I think they've taken some of those lights out of use, but it used to be every block down old 63, and 4 or 5 on 24 through the business district.
I only did the topo survey which is usually about the first thing done with a project like that so the actual construction could still be a ways off. As I was surveying a guy came up to me and introduced himself as a city councilman and asked what I was doing. I explained that I was surveying for the road project and he replied, "Huh, I haven't heard about that; maybe I should go to more council meetings!" The best part about that job was eating at the cattle company every day for lunch.
This is very true!!! I’ve taken gravel and county roads just to bypass Hannibal in the past.
Ankeny is the biggest cluster of traffic congestion in this entire state and its not even close, surprised they havent been mentioned more.
Building a 50,000 population city on the backbone of a 10,000 community is just epic mismanagement. But who decides to put a major retail corridor parallel to an interstate and only leave < 400-800 feet between them? This is a built in traffic disaster that may never be fixed.
My first two years of college were spent in that hell hole. Now when I drive to St Louis I just raise a middle finger as I drive through.
