Not far from where I live, there is a road intersection that feels like a wasted opportunity. It has, on one corner, a post office, a nice restaurant, and a couple of small shops. Across from them, there is a bank, a barbershop, and a bakery. A pharmacy sits in the other corner; the East Haven Town Green, nice and welcoming, sits right across.
Now, most of these shops have, as usual, way too many parking spaces around them, although usually in the back. But there are plenty of things to do here, as well as a wonderful park to hang out in. Yet you rarely see anyone up and about, walking from one spot to another, running errands, or enjoying an evening out. Everyone drives there, and very rarely stays or wanders around.
Part of the problem is that the two streets that meet at this intersection, Hemingway and Main, are at this point extremely wide. Hemingway is six lanes across coming from the north, with two turning lanes; and five lanes coming from the south. Main has five and three lanes, respectively. That means that in the middle of this somewhat walkable section of town, there is an ocean with 8,000 square feet of asphalt. To cross from one side to the other, you have to press one of those annoying pedestrian crossing buttons, wait for an eternity, and hurriedly cross 90 feet of pavement under the gaze of very annoyed drivers.
Because the roads are so wide, vehicles drive fast through the intersection—and even more so when they see a yellow light and are in a hurry. Five-phase traffic intersections take a lot of time to clear, after all. As a result, collisions are common, and the road feels quite unsafe for pedestrians.
The thing is, traffic lights and wide roads happen to be a pretty inefficient and unsafe way to handle traffic in busy, two-way intersections. There is a much better, simpler, and cheaper alternative: a roundabout.
Roundabouts have a few nice features. First of all, they are cheap; you don’t need traffic lights, sensors, or any hardware. Second, they keep traffic moving. Vehicles entering the roundabout must yield to those inside it, but they don’t have to stop. If traffic is light, most drivers will go through the intersection without having to wait. Third, they force vehicles to slow down, because you have to turn in and out of the circle. No more blasting through a yellow light or rushing across while pedestrians are waiting.
Fourth, they are safer. At a regular intersection, most collisions are T-bones at speed, which are extremely dangerous for everyone involved. In a roundabout, you are much more likely to sideswipe another car—and do it while going much slower. Fifth, they are much more welcoming for pedestrians, as they don’t have cars flying right past them.
Roundabouts have about the same capacity to move cars before getting jammed as a regular intersection with lights (or even a bit higher, if designed well). They require about the same amount of space as the equivalent road crossing with turning lanes and can safely handle tractor-trailers and large trucks by adding aprons and blisters as needed. Even without them, a 100-foot-wide intersection can accommodate large vehicles without any trouble.
Now, roundabouts are not a secret, unknown technology used by the ancients and foreigners. They are really popular in quite a few states, Nebraska, I am told, is oddly obsessed with them. ConnDOT has conducted several pilots and studies around the concept, and they have concluded that they work really well everywhere they have been introduced.
They just don’t build many of them. There are fewer than 20 across the whole state, despite the fact that traffic engineers know they work as intended, are safe, and make traffic flow much better.
As silly as it is, part of the problem is that a roundabout might be cheap, but our excessive construction costs make them expensive projects. ConnDOT does not have enough staff to do the design work, and any project requires absurd amounts of paperwork and permitting before being built. Although we know that plopping a circle in the middle of an intersection really works well, we just like to pretend that we cannot do it.
It is a shame, really. Roundabouts are a very cheap way to make our roads more efficient and safer. We should be building many more of them.