Traffic Experts Tout Surge in Roundabouts: Drivers Are Slow to Come Around
By Bill Laitner, Detroit Free Press
Aug. 5–Commonplace in Europe, roundabouts are an oddity in Michigan. But they’re starting to sprout in metro Detroit.
About a dozen of these circular intersections have replaced traffic signals in Macomb, Oakland and Livingston counties. There’s even a roundabout of sorts — it’s not a full circle — in downtown Detroit, around renovated Campus Martius.
And many more are coming, say highway engineers, who call the design safer, cheaper and resulting in less pollution than traffic signals. Four new roundabouts are scheduled to open by fall in west Oakland County.
In West Bloomfield, on traffic-clogged Maple Road west of Orchard Lake near the sprawling Jewish Community Center and the rapidly expanding Henry Ford Medical Center, two roundabouts are soon to open just a mile apart.
Two more are expected to open this fall in Commerce Township — one at Cooley Lake and Oxbow Lake roads and another down the way at Cooley Lake and Bogie Lake roads.
That doesn’t thrill drivers like Larry Cohen, 56, a resident of West Bloomfield since 1983. On Friday, Cohen stopped to visit his mother-in-law at a nursing home in view of the Maple-Drake construction zone.
Cohen said he prefers a conventional traffic signal to a circular intersection, adding that he’s “really concerned about whether older people will recognize what to do” when they encounter roundabouts.
That reaction doesn’t surprise Craig Bryson, spokesman with the Road Commission for Oakland County. At first, wherever roundabouts open, they jar drivers’ expectations and spawn many a contrary comment, he said.
But Bryson said there’s proof they work: Various studies from Europe and the United States show that roundabouts can cut traffic fatalities by as much as 95%.
“Some people got a bad impression of these because for years there were traffic circles out east, in Boston and Baltimore, that were huge,” Bryson said. “People would weave in and out at 50 m.p.h., so they were dangerous.”
To the contrary, modern roundabouts force traffic to slow down, although it never stops as at a red light, said Bob Hoepfner, highway engineer for Macomb County, which built three roundabouts within the last three years and has two more planned for 2008.
They’re better for the environment, Hoepfner said, because motorists don’t waste fuel while idling at red lights, and there are no signals to need electricity and maintenance.
Contact BILL LAITNER at 248-351-3297.
—–
To see more of the Detroit Free Press, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.freep.com
Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.