(Arnolds Park)– As we reported previously, the Highway 71 project through Arnolds Park and Okoboji will include the installation of new stoplights at the intersections with Lake Street at the Arnolds Park Amusement Park and Linden Drive in Arnolds Park. But another busy intersection won’t be getting them, at least for now. Some have also been calling for stop lights at Dam Road in Arnolds Park. However Dakun Schultz, a regional transportation planner with the Iowa Department of Transportation, says that intersection doesn’t warrant them as of now…
“What we do is we utilize what we call traffic warrants and they’re an established process where we look at different types of traffic, crashes, so like two hour, four hour peak traffic, that type of thing, turn movements, to determine. And if it meets warrants then we’ve got engineering judgement that determines if a signal goes in. Lake and Linden met warrants and so we worked with Okoboji, or Arnolds Park, and we’re placing the new signals.”
Schultz admits the intersection at Dam Road can be challenging to get in and out of. He says the new traffic signals at Lake Street and Linden Drive should help by putting gaps in the traffic flow at Dam Road…
“It’s tough to get in and out, especially during the summer up here. But when you have a signal at an intersection of either side of, say, Dam Road, that helps to provide some gaps to the folks entering from Dam Road. So we’re hopeful that that will help. We have our count program for northwest Iowa so we’ll count 20 counties, I believe, in northwest Iowa this from late April til late August and obviously the Lakes Area will get counted when there’s not construction going on. It will be peak summer and then, you know, we’ll have an idea of what’s happening or what’s happened since 2019 with the traffic up here.”
Schultz says you can expect to see a plethora of D.O.T vehicles and part-time staff through the upcoming summer as the counts will be going on throughout northwest Iowa.
