There’s a fascinating discussion underway amongst road users.
What’s better: roundabouts or the straight intersections that dominate most of our roadways?
An intersection that is begging to be considered for transformation into a traffic circle is the spot where a fatal collision on Nov. 1, 2012 caused headlines and heartache.
Vehicles are still travelling too fast along Government Road at Depot Road two years later and a year after engineers reported the intersection is difficult to reconfigure. Council asked municipal staff to report back last October on any and all options, possibly including a traffic circle.
According to the Transportation Association of Canada, the modern roundabout “better manages speed at intersections, and efficiently assigns right-of-way.”
A recent Maclean’s article on this question reports that American research concludes accidents are reduced by 40 per cent when straight intersections are converted to traffic circles. Injuries drop by 80 per cent.
It makes sense. When crashes happen in our conventional intersections, the possibility of serious collisions is high due to the fact that most crashes are either head-on collisions or T-bone crashes. These types of crashes rarely happen in roundabouts.
Transport Canada indicates that roundabouts help reduce fuel consumption by allowing drivers to stay in motion.
Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the hosts of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel, tested the belief that roundabouts are more effective at moving vehicles through an intersection than four-way stops.
Their conclusion: myth confirmed.
“From a driving perspective, this is dreamy,” says Savage in the program from August of this year.
Hyneman and Savage put vehicles through a simulated four-way stop for 15 minutes and then the same vehicles were processed in a roundabout over the same amount of time.
“We counted an average number of 385 cars,” says Savage of the traffic flow through the stop signs.
“The roundabout, on the other hand, allowed a whopping 460 cars to pass through it,” counters Hyneman. “That’s an improvement of almost 20 per cent.”
Savage gets the final word: “I’m calling it. I’m saying the roundabout wins and that this myth is confirmed.”
The conclusion of Mythbusters is backed with strong evidence from far more credible sources supporting the use of roundabouts over the format we mostly use here.
We’re going round and round about the intersection of Government and Depot, but at this point it isn’t solving the safety concern.
