Roundabouts Aren’t a Cure-All for Your Traffic Problems

(Source: Unsplash/Matt Seymour.)

In Oakboro, North Carolina, an intersection improvement project by the North Carolina Department of Transportation has resulted in drivers misusing the left-turn lanes on Main Street. The Oakboro Police Department has been saddled with the task of fixing the issue through education and enforcement, but, as I explained in a previous article, this is a design problem, not an enforcement problem.

I enjoyed reading through all of the social media posts on the viral Oakboro Police Department post on the matter. I took particular interest in the comments in the thread on the Strong Towns Facebook Page, because I wanted to see the impressions and thoughts from the movement. The dialogue was fascinating and I hope the town of Oakboro or any other community with this type of traffic engineering failure is encouraged and empowered to revise the design of their streets through small, low-risk steps.

That said, the prevailing solution commenters offered for the intersection in Oakboro was to replace it with a roundabout—or more specifically, an elongated oval that looks like a jelly bean or squished peanut. The genius in such a design is that it would remove all the problematic left turns. Not to mention, it would result in less asphalt, calmer traffic, slower speeds, pedestrian safety, continuous movement, and no need for traffic lights. 

However, the roundabout should not be the default solution. A roundabout is a giant leap from the current dedicated turn lanes and multiple traffic lights. The left-turn issues drivers are experiencing at this intersection are fairly new, so, as a result, the community might—and should—be very skeptical of an engineer proposing yet another radical change to Main Street.

Roundabouts to urban designers are like towers to architects. Architects always end up with a project that has a strange angle they cannot resolve or prominent terminated vista they have not fully worked out in their projects. The default for the architect is to add a tower that can defy the logic of a square room or act as a placeholder for additional study. Towers are a cure-all for the architect, and, likewise, roundabouts are the cure-all default for the urban designer. The roundabout fills a void that needs greater study. In the abstract they are beautiful, but the best-functioning roundabouts take months (if not years) of design and rarely are round.

I admit, I also immediately gravitated to the roundabout as a response to the issues in this current roadway design. Using my pencil, I followed the existing outside curves of the curb lines, which created a funny-looking peanut. This sketch illustrates how much additional asphalt exists in this intersection to accommodate all the turn lanes.

Once I started, I could not get the idea of a roundabout out of my head, so I did another that was a little more oval, which may seem a little more believable to an average citizen in Oakboro. 

I, too, fell into the trap of using the roundabout as a cure-all—but these sketches are just that: sketches. Through a sketch, I am simply showing an alternative idea in the abstract. This type of design needs lots of study and technical input so that one poorly designed project is not replaced with another poorly designed project. 

That process will take time, so a roundabout is not the next smallest step to resolve this problem now. Oakboro cannot wait for another giant leap; they need to explore lots of small responses to address the most urgent safety concerns at this intersection. The next smallest step should be responses that could be easily implemented with resources that Oakboro currently has, such as the tools they use to close Main Street for the 4th of July parade.

The Strong Towns movement is about incremental change and not giant leaps. Cities like Oakboro have a responsibility to respond to valid concerns raised by their citizens, and the giant leap to completely reconstruct this intersection does not address the immediate need at hand.

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