I've lived in Iowa all my life. I've lived in Northwest, Northeast and Southeast. I've traveled across the state many times and I can tell you- there is not an "excess" of highways. There is really only two major roads going East-West I-80 and US-HWY 20 and two North-South I-35 and I-380. That is it.. One of them isn't even classified as an interstate but at least it is 2-lane and 65 MPH. If your going anywhere in the state you pretty much take a county highway to get onto one of those four roads and then travel the majority of your journey on those roads. I am going to assume they are thinking about all of these local county highways. Let me tell you, once you get out of a city, off one of those 4 major roads I listed there is only county highways left. This is how you get to all those those shrinking towns Iowa is dotted with. You get off those and you are putting some gravel in your travel.

I love that stuff. Blue reminds me of a shirley temple. Been a shame since all my local gas stations and stores stopped carrying it. Just too expensive to order it from ThinkGeek and can never get myself to throw down on a case of it off of Amazon. I liked the mints with carbonation too, was pretty cool to drop a few into the bottle.

Sometimes having enough or too much water leads to problems as well.

Being from Iowa it's hard for me to comprehend this huge use of water for agriculture. I have lived across 3/4 of the state now, work at an Ag company, and I rarely ever see any sort of irrigation system in place to water the crops- that is, corn and beans. Have seen a few systems setup for creating sod. When we experience drought the crops don't do so well- irrigation systems are just too expensive to implement for most farmers. Conversely we tile all of our fields and created a network (districts) of drainage ditches. This provides a nice path for all that agricultural waste to flow right into the rivers, which is where all that tiling and drainage ditches lead to- ultimately to either the Missouri and Mississippi.

Unfortunately for all of the states below along the Missouri and Mississippi our abundance of water provides them with all of our nitrates (http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/agriculture/2015/04/11/data-shows-nitrates-higher-improving-iowa-rivers/25606321/), our hog waste (http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/hog-wild-factory-farms-are-poisoning-iowas-drinking-water) and the Mississippi delta gets a ton of nice pfisteria from that hog waste to kill off all those pesky fisheries.

I bet you wear a helmet on a bicycle too...

It would be so different- watching the past instead of the future of the road.