Roundabout Has Come Full Circle, Backers Say

Some people already find it hard to locate an address on 26th Street in Santa Monica without driving in circles.

This week, motorists on a stretch of the street that runs through an affluent residential neighborhood near Montana Avenue will truly go round and round as the city opens a new kind of traffic circle.

The new roundabout is one of many being built around the nation as planners embrace a new mantra in transportation planning known as “traffic calming.”

The trendy traffic circles are different from their old-fashioned counterparts because they have no stop signs and no signal lights and because they are in residential neighborhoods rather than at busy commercial intersections.

They’ve been built recently in Boulder, Colo., Seattle and several California cities.

But even though the circles are touted as beneficial to homeowners because they slow down traffic, they have also drawn much criticism.

Firefighters complain that the roundabouts slow down emergency vehicles. Advocates for people with disabilities say that without signals or stop signs, the roads are difficult to cross.

The circles are particularly troublesome for blind pedestrians because they cannot see gaps in the traffic and there are no signals to indicate when vehicles must stop.

At a traditional intersection, “for any pedestrian, if they obey the signal, they have the right-of-way,” said Patti Boekamp, chief deputy director for transportation and drainage design for the city of San Diego. “With these [circles], they have to pick their gaps and cross.”

Santa Monica’s roundabout, in fact, was built as part of the city’s $4.7-million pedestrian improvement project. But it has no stop signs or signals to make traffic stop for people on foot. Pedestrians must walk around a good portion of the circle to cross the street.

Beth Rolandson, senior transportation manager for Santa Monica, said the city put in the roundabout at 26th Street and Washington Avenue to make it easier for pedestrians to cross the street.

Before, she said, there was a stop sign on Washington, but no sign or signal on 26th Street. So many cars came whizzing down 26th on their way to or from the Santa Monica Freeway that it was difficult for drivers and walkers to cross Washington.

Planners worried that installing a signal would encourage drivers to use Washington as a feeder street to 26th, making the street and the intersection even busier.

“There were concerns that since this was the intersection of a more busy street with a residential street, a traffic signal would fundamentally change the traffic pattern,” Rolandson said.

“We were afraid that people who used to take California or Idaho [avenues] ... would all start taking Washington.”

Instead, Rolandson said, the city decided to build the roundabout.

Roundabouts are in use around the world as traffic-control devices at intersections. All vehicles approaching the circle must slow, proceeding to the right and yielding to traffic already in the circle, but not necessarily stopping.

One way to think about it is to picture a circle superimposed on a cross.

A driver turning right proceeds around the circle a quarter-turn and exits on the first leg of the cross. A driver going straight through the circle drives halfway around and proceeds on through. Someone wanting to turn left must travel three-quarters of the way around. A driver making a U-turn would go all the way around and back out the way he came.

The theory is that, although all traffic is slowed at the circle, the flow actually improves because no vehicles are tied up at stop signs or signals.

Pedestrians crossing at a circle do not have the advantage of a signal to stop traffic, but they cross fewer lanes of traffic at a time, which many planners believe makes it safer to cross.

The circles are widely believed to reduce accidents.

Los Angeles transportation planners hope to install one at an unwieldy five-way intersection at Cesar Chavez Avenue, Indiana Street and La Reina Avenue on the Eastside, where there have been 28 accidents over the last five years.

One problem, however, is that most Americans are not familiar with traffic circles and don’t know how to enter them or proceed through them.

Matt Haddad, who lives on Washington Avenue near the new circle in Santa Monica, said he is still not clear about how the roundabout will work, or why it is necessary.

“I don’t know why they’re doing it,” Haddad said. “It seems to me that it’s a little extreme.”

In Long Beach, city traffic engineer David Roseman said the massive Los Alamitos traffic circle at Pacific Coast Highway and California 19 gives the heavily used intersection better traffic flow than regular signaled crossings.

An update to the Depression-era circle replaced its traffic lights with yield signs and redesigned some of the lanes. Roseman said that although the intersection is still an “accident generator” for the city, he credits the modernization with reducing the number and intensity of crashes there.

New Jersey has removed nearly half of its 75 aging traffic circles, saying they had become obsolete and dangerous. Built in the 1920s and ‘30s like the Long Beach circle, some were notorious locations for accidents.

The Ledgewood Circle in Morris County, at the intersection of Highways 46 and 10, averaged at least 100 accidents a year, said Mike Haran, spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Transportation. The intersection now averages fewer than 10 accidents a year.

John Fisher, assistant director of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, said modern traffic engineers believe they can get around some of the drawbacks of the old circles.

Engineers now know how to tweak the curves and angles of roundabouts, for example, to slow traffic just the right amount or move it a certain way.

The old roundabouts were not so tightly engineered, transportation planners said, and many became downright dangerous as cars got bigger and faster -- and so much more plentiful.

The new circles, by contrast, are so popular among planners that even New Jersey is considering installing some.

“Our design standards now are more liberal,” explained Roseman in Long Beach. “We’re not all driving around in Model Ts any more.”

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