Any American who has driven through parts of Europe or other countries may have encountered something that to American
sensibilities, can seem baffling.
The roundabout, the traffic feature that can literally have you driving in circles is
almost entirely missing from the US.
And Americans may dread driving through one, fearing they will suffer a fate akin to that of the
hapless Clark Griswold.
It's amazing. I cannot get left.
Needless to say, compared to Europe, the US is roundabout poor between the two.
Europe dominates a list of the 25 cities with the most.
That is except for Miami, Florida, Berkeley, California.
And believe it or not, Carmel, Indiana.
We're excited about our roundabouts.
I'm told this is number 121.
The mayor of Carmel, Jim Brainard, became enamored of roundabouts while studying in the UK as a young
man. He has filled the streets with them about 150 and counting in a city of
100,000 people.
And I get requests every month.
Seems can you get rid of this traffic light near my house or near my business?
I couldn't take a roundabout out today if I wanted to.
The people here are very proud of what we've done because they know that it's safer.
Research supports this.
Roundabouts are considerably safer for drivers and pedestrians and cause much less congestion than traffic
lights. They're even better for the environment.
So are they all they're cracked up to be?
And if so, why hasn't the US adopted them?
This is Jim Brainard.
He's been the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, since 1996 when he took office.
Carmel had a quarter of its current population, and the roads were laid out on a rural grid.
Long stretches of road in between stoplights.
What I heard from the people I talked to when I ran for mayor that first election
was they wanted a traditional downtown.
He knew they wouldn't be able to accomplish that with the layout the city had.
We looked at other suburbs around the United States and in North America, and we saw all this
congestion and we thought we just have to do better if we're going to have a successful, competitive city.
So he thought of roundabouts.
The single lane roundabout or also the mini roundabout.
They are the safest type of intersection which you can have.
They are much safer than signalized intersections.
Roundabouts are basically circular intersections where traffic moves in one direction
around the circle.
Modern roundabouts tend to be relatively tight circles and often have one lane, though they can have
more. The tighter the circle, the more drivers have to slow down when entering and
exiting the roundabout.
This is how it works.
The first thing to know is in a modern roundabout, traffic already in the circle has the right
of way when entering a roundabout.
Cars should slow down, look to the left and yield to any cars coming through the circle.
There might be signs posted indicating the rules and the speed limit.
If the roundabout has two or more lanes, drivers will want to get into the appropriate lane for their
exit. For example, taking an exit further away might require a driver to get into a left
lane. A very near exit might require a driver to keep right.
Often signs will be posted, but you will need to plan accordingly.
As a car approaches its exit, the driver should use the turn signal and then make a right turn to then head
out of the roundabout.
Cars should yield to pedestrians crossing and bicycles within the circle.
More importantly, there isn't really an opportunity for the kinds of collisions that occur when a driver runs a red
light because there are no red lights to run.
The most severe intersection crashes head on right angle and left turn collisions are
unlikely in 2021.
24% of all US crash deaths 10,445 people occurred at intersections
that same year.
An estimated 127,000 people were injured in red light running crashes.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IHS, cites a number of studies done on
the safety benefits of roundabouts.
Among other things.
The findings show that converting traffic signs or traffic signals to roundabouts reduced crashes by up to
62% and injury crashes by up to 87%.
Most of these studies focus on single lane roundabouts, the preferred style for most designers and the one considered
the safest. Roundabouts also appear to be safer for pedestrians.
You walk on a sidewalk around the perimeter of the road and if you need to cross, you only need to watch out for
traffic coming in one direction at a time.
Also, again, cars are driving about 10 to 15mph.
Areas that adopt them have seen drops in traffic congestion.
Cars don't spend time sitting still at red lights.
Traffic doesn't get backed up behind a vehicle attempting a left turn.
There are no left turns that vehicles inside the circle have right of way also helps
prevent backups.
Carmel Mayor Brainard has seen all of these effects with the roundabouts in his town.
The average vehicle fatality rate in the US is 12.9 deaths per 100,000 people and
the rate is slightly higher in neighboring Indianapolis.
Carmel, on the other hand, which shares some roads with the larger city and a lot of the same drivers, has a
fatality rate of just over two per 100,000 people.
Accident related injuries are down 80%.
The town has been able to narrow roads, remove lanes.
Brainard says they move traffic 50% faster.
The city is also saving a lot of money.
A single traffic light costs about $400,000, Brainard says.
They draw a lot of electricity, just like a lot of electricity.
So you're looking at 8 to $10,000 a year per light.
So if you've got 100, 200 lights in your city, do the math.
There's a lot of money. And then after 20 years, you've got to replace that $400,000 light plus
inflation.
That's just the light.
Then you have to employ people to service the lights, manage the timing on the lights.
Natural disasters such as severe storms can knock traffic lights out.
Then consider the cost of adding more lanes to roads as population increases.
But if these are so wonderful, why didn't they take off in America?
Why isn't every US town like Carmel?
A bit of history might help explain.
Modern roundabouts are descendants of the traffic circle, which did indeed have a presence in the United
States. Columbus Circle in Manhattan is one such traffic circle.
In fact, those circular roads had been seen in cities long before cars came around.
Columbus Circle is considered the first roundabout of the automobile era.
It was the brainchild of William Phelps Eno, a rather legendary figure in the history of traffic
control, also known today for the think tank that bears his name.
We drive on the right side of the road here in the United States.
Thanks to him and his his ideas.
He invented the stop sign.
He basically invented the sidewalk.
We didn't have sidewalk rules or regulations.
So he, you know, laid out those kinds of rules for for New York, laid out the code
for for streets in New York City.
One way streets, taxi stands, all these things we take for granted right now.
The New York Police Department had asked Eno to help solve the problem of chaos and accidents that were happening at
Columbus Circle at the time Around the turn of the 20th century.
Just after 1900, Columbus Circle was notorious for lots of accidents.
He didn't have any regulations.
People were going both directions around the circle.
Eno proposed that traffic around the circle move in a single direction rather than two.
It was that simple proposal and the design that resulted from it that reduced accidents to a surprising
extent.
It improved traffic congestion in around that part of Manhattan and it soon became adopted in
Paris around the Arc de Triomphe.
Piccadilly Circus in in London and a couple of other places.
Initially, the people in England didn't like that, and they made a lot of jokes about this.
And also the word roundabout is just a joke.
It's people were talking about it.
It's a terrible thing.
They go just round about this island, this and that is the reason of this of this word in English.
Despite the mockery, the concept stuck and was refined into the modern roundabout in the UK
around 1960.
It was the British and other European designers who improved on the design by making the circle in the center
smaller, reducing the lanes and ensuring vehicles already in the circle have the right of way over those
entering.
You're bringing the car to to, you know, slowing it down so that it's not just speeding through these these
intersections. It's a very subtle change, but actually made a big impact.
Transportation researcher Lee Roediger says estimates of roundabouts in the top European countries are
about 30 to 50,000.
In France, about 30,000 in Spain and 25,000 in the United Kingdom.
This isn't perfect, but let me put that all in perspective.
The US has about 290 million cars and France about 39 million.
Let's say there are about 40,000 roundabouts in France.
If the US had as many roundabouts per vehicle as France does, we should have something in the area of
300,000. We currently have 10,000.
Bear in mind the comparison has limitations.
The US has large swaths of sparsely populated land and longer distances between
areas.
A lot of other countries adopted it very, very, very robustly.
But we we didn't really do that here for a number of years.
So why not the US?
There were a few main reasons.
One, Eno's initial traffic circle concept was adopted by other designers in ways that were ever more
complicated. A lot of these were often called rotaries much bigger.
You would change lanes in them.
They had other kind of traffic islands in them sometimes, and they really didn't prove to be much safer
than than the way that the roads were configured before.
And so they actually wound up falling out of favor in the United States.
They didn't really have much of a utility because we kind of over engineered and over designed these.
Of course, there were large traffic circles in places across Europe, but inefficient designs were mostly
abandoned. And there was a kind of modern homegrown alternative that was ready to replace them.
Meanwhile, the traffic signal became the traffic control method of choice at intersections in America,
thanks in part to aggressive salespeople.
They would go into these communities and provide lots of free advice for how to improve safety and
traffic congestion in these intersections.
And hey, by the way, we have these signals that we can sell you because we were electrifying lots of the country.
All this kind of went hand in hand and it became I mean, fairly probably became a a
rational, modern approach to to improving these intersections as opposed to
this old model from the turn of the century.
Finally, as traffic control became a standardized discipline in the US, people in the profession looked to the
manual on uniform traffic control devices, which is the blueprint.
Traffic engineers use to design roads.
It lays out, I guess you would say, simpler, more straightforward intersection.
Again that are signalized as opposed to roundabouts, which may take up a little bit more space,
especially in an urban environment.
It may it may eat up more of the of the landscape than than a signalized intersection.
They may take a little bit longer to pull together.
The first modern roundabouts in the United States were constructed in Nevada in 1990.
That is three decades after the modern Roundabout was introduced in the UK.
Americans are often resistant to the idea of introducing a roundabout in their communities.
A lot of it was inertia. Traffic engineering and inertia go hand in hand and did for for a number of years.
And it's only now that we're starting to see where some of those problems are actually starting to see some of the
challenges with some of the ideas that Mr.
Eno pulled together.
When Jim Brainard took the helm of Carmel, Indiana, in late 1996, roundabouts were nowhere in the city
or in the minds of people he consulted.
Everyone suggested adding more lanes.
You know, I didn't have a background in civil engineering, knew nothing about civil engineering, so I kept asking
questions. And many times the answers I got were, I don't know why we do it that way.
That's just the way we were taught.
And they had they just didn't think about it.
And so we had some really good engineers and said, okay, let's rethink this.
Since then, Carmel has replaced all but a handful of its traffic lights and plans to finish off the rest of the
conversions within years.
Roundabouts have been catching on in the rest of the US.
The country has been adding around 500 to 700 of them per year for the past 15 years or so.
States such as New York and Virginia have adopted roundabout first policies that require giving preference to
roundabouts when building repairing intersections.
Researcher Wang, who lives in Northern Virginia.
Yeah, I can I can tell from my my experience in this area where I'm living,
I just started to see more and more roundabouts being built.
The states with the most roundabouts, Florida, California and Colorado.
We did several, several surveys in some US communities, which were several
roundabouts were built. And we found that, yes, at the beginning, the.
Like the percentage of the drivers who would favor the idea of roundabouts was relatively
low. But once they get, the drivers get the chance of like driving around the
roundabouts and then get more experience driving around the roundabouts, they are more
acceptable.
That said, these are not considered perfect.
There are a few potential drawbacks depending on the needs and the designs.
The Guardian in 2015 reported that some cities in the UK are removing roundabouts in favor
of traffic lights.
They said the roundabouts were actually worse for bicyclists.
It seems to depend on how the roundabout is designed and whether it has a protected lane for bicyclists.
A review of 49 studies found that roundabouts can actually dramatically increase bicycle crashes
unless there is a protected bike lane.
Researchers in Belgium found that single lane roundabouts without a protected bike lane increased crashes by
93%, while Danish researchers said roundabouts that did have separated lanes saw an
84% reduction in crashes.
Brainard has said an increase in crashes involving bicyclists has not happened in Carmel.
It is also observed that single lane roundabouts have a harder time accommodating a throughput of more than
25,000 cars per day.
We have one solution which has partly to
two lanes on the circle.
We call it double roundabouts.
They have been invented in the Netherlands and some of them are also being used in Germany
and they come up to a capacity of 31,000, 35,000.
But this is still not much.
If you have more traffic than in Germany, you need a signalized intersection.
Verner Braun designed one such multi-lane roundabout in the German city of Baden-Baden, and there are also
some in the Netherlands.
But this type is only useful under specific conditions.
If you have one predominating movement and it is useful
if traffic is distributed over all the entrances and exits equally rather
equally, then it doesn't work.
The risk is that the more lanes or other elements there are, the more confusing it can be for drivers, at least
at first.
Over the long term, over a few years after the round walls were built, we see
increasing safety benefits at least double in roundabouts.
We think probably because the drivers, as the drivers gain more experience navigating these
roundabouts, they know how it works, They know how to drive through it.
And then then we should expect larger safety benefits at these roundabouts.
Carmel even has a roundabout on the Keystone Parkway, a high traffic highway, and the city has no
intention of going back to stoplights.
We had to build a city that was beautiful and worked really well.
If we were going to compete and we have been able to compete.
We have 150 corporate headquarters in Carmel.
We have been rated over and over by various organizations.
One of the best places to live in the United States, one of the best places to retire, one of the best places to
raise families, one of the best places for single people.
And so it's because we set out to build a city that worked and the
transportation network is one of those basic things that a city has to do right for it
to work.