Are Highway 30 communities willing to make sacrifices?

A four-laned Highway 30 across Iowa has been a vision of leaders in counties and towns along the route for decades.

There’s no question that a wider road would stimulate economic development along the way, and improve traffic safety as well, in addition to speeding up the traffic flow.

But for the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT), which pays the cost and makes the decisions on major road projects, the purpose of a four-lane highway is to move traffic as quickly and effortlessly as possible.

That means eliminating bottlenecks. And that in turn means significant changes for communities along the route.

Local leaders should seek local input in advance, and use it for their talking points with the state road officials to make sure that as little negative disruption as possible takes place when and if Highway 30 is widened.

Take Highway 20, the closest route comparable to Highway 30, some 35 or 40 miles to the north. Highway 20 once went through most of the larger Iowa towns along its route.

In fact, as with Highway 30, the towns along Highway 20 worked hard back in the day to make sure the road passed through their downtowns, or at least close to downtown.

Community leaders back then saw major transcontinental roads as a way to stimulate commerce, much of it retail, within their towns.

But Highway 20 no longer transects Waterloo, or Iowa Falls, or Fort Dodge, or any community along most of its route. They’re bypassed, with little or no speed limit reduction from Dubuque on west.

There’s a stretch of the route that’s still two lanes through a couple of counties in western Iowa, but once that’s completed, Highway 20 will pass through no towns from Dubuque to Sioux City.

State transportation officials will require the same for Highway 30.

Right now on the route through eastern Iowa, where the road is four lanes wide, it goes through no towns. Only the two-lane portions still penetrate communities.

In central Iowa, the four-lane portion bypasses Marshalltown, Nevada, Ames, Boone and Ogden, for example.

The same would have to happen with a four-laned Highway 30 across western Iowa.

The state DOT, back in the 1990s, took a stab at planning the highway’s route if it were four-laned from Ogden to Carroll, a distance of about 47 miles.

That plan, which so far as I know has remained the same, would curve up around Jefferson to the north about half a mile, or maybe a mile, bypassing the present Highway 30 route that runs along the north edge of town. It would then angle southwest back to the current route about two miles west of town.

The new route would turn the present stretch of the road at Jefferson — adjacent to the motels, the casino and hotel, a service station, several commercial firms and several manufacturers — into an alternate or business route.

The businesses would no longer be on the main highway.

The same is true for Glidden, where the route would also bypass the community on the north.

But the real rub would come with communities like Carroll, Denison and other towns westward from Glidden. There, Highway 30 goes through those communities’ hearts. There would be no way, for example, to widen Highway 30 through Carroll on its present right-of-way.

The DOT might take on short stretches of Highway 30 for widening if traffic counts or road conditions could justify the work. The nonprofit Highway 30 Coalition, as an example, has made the six miles between Glidden and Carroll one of its top priorities for four-laning. The traffic count along that stretch is particularly high.

And just this month, the coalition added the stretch from Ogden to Scranton, including Grand Junction and Jefferson, to its top-priority list.

But the DOT is not likely to place priority status on widening Highway 30 across the entire state until local communities agree to some local sacrifices for the greater good.

Those discussions have yet to be resolved.

Back in the late 1950s, Jefferson leaders fought the Iowa Highway Commission (as it was then called) when plans called for Highway 30 to move from the Lincoln Way route through downtown out to its present route along the north edge of town. But it wasn’t long before a local consensus developed that the community was much better off without the highway’s car and truck traffic bottling up Lincoln Way through town.

Rerouting Highway 30 around towns today would cause some commercial disruption, and would eliminate numerous acres of farmland and possibly some farmsteads as well.

The DOT today includes economic development advantages as well as safety, traffic count and road suitability as factors in determining road improvement projects.

The economic development factor cuts both ways.

A short-stretch project can boost development in a local area. But short stretches don’t help the state in its entirety very much; that comes only with something like the Highway 20 four-lane project.

Each particular community along Highway 30 across the state needs to decide if it’s willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.

Without that consensus, the Iowa DOT is not likely to make Highway 30 widening a priority.

It’s time for discussions to begin at the local level, in each affected town and county.