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https://bleacherreport.com/articles/10098984-oakland-ballers-independent-baseball-team-started-by-fans-ahead-of-as-vegas-move


Note there is hype to make a new Oakland Baseball team but for now its not bound to reality.

A 2nd entrance to Epic is currently being constructed. County PD is being expanded to Country View Rd where there will be a new signal and entrance. I’m guessing a new road is going to be constructed from the interchange into the new west entrance.

US 12 between Whitewater and Elkhorn is the proposal that was most seriously considered. There was a study but was shelved. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s resurrected. Marshfield got US 10 to be upgraded arguing that it was the largest city without a 4 lane highway. That crown now goes to Whitewater and an upgraded US 12 would connect it with I-43. The mapped corridor is also there.

Northwest of Whitewater, there probably won’t be any improvements. Traffic heading to Madison takes County N/Wis 59 to I-39/I-90 between Whitewater and Madison. US 12 serves mostly local traffic in that area.

thanks for posting those videos!

those ramps are long enough that it stands out that there's no mile markers posted.

Wisconsin has a nice interstate compatible freeway on its side of the state line end there and there are other improvements that are certainly possible (ie, a clear path exists for the potential Wlkhorn-Whitewater 'corner cut' as a 'super two' on an upgradable four lane ROW).  However, that is all for the future and we'll have to long term stay tuned for that.

Mike

That nice interstate compatible 4-lane ends at a 70 MPH freeway that now free-flow connects to a very nice upgraded I-90. There is really no reason to corner cut or do anything else with US-12 at this point. There's no return on investment there.

Eh?   I don't understand what route you're describing here.  Do you mean I-43 as the "70 mph freeway that now free-flow connects to a very nice upgraded I-90"?    The same I-43 that's headed southwest rather than northwest at that point, taking you first back down to near the state line at Beloit before you get to the nice upgraded I-90? 

Yes, exactly. On the surface, it makes no sense. However, despite being 15 miles farther to Madison than a straight-shot drive along US-12, it's the same or similar drive time (per the Google). Ditto for Elkhorn -> Janesville.

Walworth County, despite the existence of Lake Geneva, has never quite established enough of its own demand to get a 4-lane US-12 connection to Madison. Illinois never completing its US-12 freeway killed any ambition for it on the Wisconsin side of the border. Coming from downtown Chicago, there's no advantage to diverting from either I-90 or I-94 to get to Madison.

The Madison metro area may not have the explosive growth of, say, an Austin TX, but for the Midwest it's a rapidly growing area. It's on a similar growth track as Columbus, OH, a city that is infamous on AARoads for its lack of NW/SE highway connectivity. Highway planners in the 1950s and 60s were not banking on that; otherwise a US-12 freeway to Chicago might've gotten off the table.

Janesville on its own hasn't quite driven demand for its own E/W 4-lane connection, though a 4-lane US-14 connection to I-43 keeps bubbling under the surface. It was close to happening when GM still produced vehicles there, but the plant's closure in 2008 killed it. Putting that in place would be a decent consolation prize, but not holding my breath for that. 4-laning Hwy 26 doesn't help that cause; doing that solved the issue of Janesville not having a 4-lane connection to Milwaukee.

Fictional concept: An I-31 or I-33 along the US-287 corridor entirely from Fort Worth, TX to Limon, CO.

Even though US-287 is technically a North-South highway the route between Fort Worth and Amarillo is much more of an East-West route. A long time ago the Roads and Bridges publication suggested "I-32" as a route from Fort Worth to Raton via Amarillo.

With the way the North Texas region is growing around the DFW metroplex and some larger population migration trends I can see the potential of I-32 and I-34 getting used up there. That is if the corridors don't get impossibly covered up with development. US-287 from Fort Worth to Amarillo is do-able (although building thru Decatur will be a serious hurdle). I think US-82 from Wichita Falls to Texarkana (technically Henrietta to New Boston) needs a lot of improvements. The Gainseville to Sherman segment is getting urgent. More encroachment is happening along US-82. It could turn into another mess similar to US-380 between Denton and McKinney.

I think chances of extending I-27 to Limon are much better than Raton. Maybe if the Feds got back into a 90/10 funding arrangement it might be possible to get NM lawmakers on board. But even that might not be a guarantee.

Decades ago, there was discussion of I-45 following SH-114 to US-287 and US-287 to at least Amarillo. I feel really comfortable if I-45 is extended now, it almost surely would be along US-75.

I'd certainly prefer I-45 extended along US-75 and US-69 in Oklahoma.

Every bit of land in the US, developed or not, has already been surveyed. And almost all of that land (excepting old colonial systems) has been surveyed in miles. So there is no new grid plan to be had.

It gets even better when you consider where the land came from before development.  It's likely that, before the developer bought the land, it was farmland.  In this part of the country, it's likely that such farmland was one square-mile or some power-of-two portion thereof.  So now we must imagine a field, exactly one mile by one mile square, being developed into a residential neighborhood whose streets and house numbers are based on meters.

So, let's say Farmer Brown retires and sells his half-section farm (shown in tan below) to some developers.  The rest of the neighboring town has blocks of one eighth-mile by one sixteenth-mile.  Hope you enjoy the new system!  Hope you like all those unprotected left turns to or from the main roads!  But it's metric, so it must be better...

Except 1/16 mi ~ 100 m, within range of the average surveying error in the 18th-19th Centuries. That would mean a block 1/16 mi square is essentially 1 hectare, making most metric conversions facile for all but the most specialized purposes.

This is just not a problem.

Wisconsin
Tier 1: Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay
Tier 2: Janesville/Beloit, Appleton, Oshkosh, Racine/Kenosha, Eau Claire, La Crosse, Waukesha
Tier 3: Wausau, Stevens Point, Wisconsin Dells, Fond du Lac, Beaver Dam, Sheboygan, Manitowoc, Superior
Tier 4: Portage, Tomah, Lake Geneva, Hudson, Menomonie, Marinette, Rhinelander, Sturgeon Bay, Shawano, Prairie du Chien, Dodgeville, Platteville, Rice Lake, Ashland, Hurley, Richland Center, Monroe, Watertown, Whitewater
Outside cities: Chicago IL, Rockford IL, Dubuque IA, Cedar Rapids IA, St Paul MN, Duluth MN, Marquette MI

Oshkosh, Racine, Kenosha, and Waukesha can be bumped to tier 3 in my opinion. Perhaps even tier 4 for Waukesha. I’d also put Beaver Dam in 4.

This is impressive but not actually that impressive - if you just plug the route into Google and specify a departure time of 12 AM it says "24 hours." Speed a little bit but not crazy fast to offset restroom and fuel stops and you're there.

I would bet any pair of two competent drivers could pull this off- that said it's still cool to actually do it so good job.

I would like to nominate I-70 between Pickerington and Zanesville. Going east to west, traffic counts start at 33k, increase to 50k at Etna, and are 98k by the time you pass the exit at Ohio 256, where 6 laning begins in the Columbus metro. This was made more pressing by the recent accident just east of Etna that took the lives of 6 people.

Agreed, at the very least it would make sense to extend 6 lanes to the existing 6 lane stretch near Buckeye Lake. When I drove that stretch coming from the east I exited at OH 13 and was surprised to see 6 lanes already, but was even more surprised to later learn that the 6 lanes there don't extend into Columbus.