These Americans Are Just Going Around in Circles. It Helps the Climate.

[elleng]

An Indiana city has the most roundabouts in the country. They’ve saved lives and reduced injuries from crashes — and lowered carbon emissions.

CARMEL, Ind. — It’s getting harder and harder to run a stoplight here, because there are fewer and fewer of them around. Every year, at intersections throughout this thriving city, traffic lights and stop signs have disappeared, replaced with roundabouts.

Lots and lots of roundabouts.

There is a roundabout decorated with the local high school mascot, a greyhound and another with giant steel flowers. A three-mile stretch of Carmel’s Main Street has 11 roundabouts alone. The roundabout that locals perhaps prize the most features box hedges and a three-tier bronze fountain made in France. In 2016, it was named “International Roundabout of the Year” by no less than the U.K. Roundabout Appreciation Society, which, according to the Carmel mayor, Jim Brainard, is largely made up of “three guys in a pub.” (Their actual membership is six. But, still.)

Carmel, a city of 102,000 north of Indianapolis, has 140 roundabouts, with over a dozen still to come. No American city has more. The main reason is safety; compared with regular intersections, roundabouts significantly reduce injuries and deaths.

But there’s also a climate benefit.

Because modern roundabouts don’t have red lights where cars sit and idle, they don’t burn as much gasoline. While there are few studies, the former city engineer for Carmel, Mike McBride, estimates that each roundabout saves about 20,000 gallons of fuel annually, which means the cars of Carmel emit many fewer tons of planet-heating carbon emissions each year. And U.S. highway officials broadly agree that roundabouts reduce tailpipe emissions.

They also don’t need electricity, and, unlike stoplights, keep functioning after bad storms — a bonus in these meteorologically turbulent times.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/climate/roundabouts-climate-emissions-driving.html

[TheRealNorth]

1. One problem with the implementation of roundabouts....

Is that state DOT's don't do PSA's on how to do them. I think it was assumed that people would remember something that was briefly covered in Drivers Ed and not seen since.

I like them for intersections that are busy enough that they need traffic to slow down or stop, but not too busy.

But they do cut down on fatal crashes by cutting down on people blowing through stop signs and stop lights at highway speeds.

[KT2000]

2. They started putting these in

without any instructions how to use them. Some were treating them as 4-way stops and others just waited until there were no cars. Finally, they paper had some instructions. They work well but there are some who use them aggressively. They speed up and blast into the roundabout causing others to slam on brakes. Driving is getting more hazardous lately with angry people, entitled people, and downright poor drivers from Texas.