'Traffic lights are so dictatorial' ... but are roundabouts on the way out?

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/oct/19/traffic-lights-roundabouts-way-out

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You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. But unlike Joni Mitchell, I’m driving in Newcastle, not Honolulu, and it’s not a parking lot that they’ve paved paradise to put up, but yet another set of traffic lights.

Since resuming the school run last month, I’ve noticed that two different roundabouts on our route have vanished, replaced by junctions and traffic lights. My first reaction to the missing roundabouts was: where will the council plant its scrawny tree this Christmas?

But I must confess another reason for seeing red: bristling umbrage that a higher power is telling me when to stop and when to go, when I was quite content to travel independently clockwise around a central island.

It’s just begun. In the west of the city, the doughnut-shaped Cowgate roundabout is next to go, its “hole” filled with polystyrene blocks so they can build a new road over top with traffic lights. The same is happening in other UK cities, which have decided that signal junctions are better for traffic flow and safer for cyclists.

But here’s the irony. After a century of resistance, US cities are finally learning to love the roundabout – the Bronx just got its first – believing them to be safer and better for traffic flow.

So who is right?

The carrefour à gyration may have been a French idea, but it was the British who picked it up and drove with it. A wooden sign celebrates Letchworth Garden City’s Broadway roundabout as Britain’s first, installed by Arts and Crafts planners Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin in 1909. Sixty years later, the maverick traffic engineer Frank Blackmore invented the modern roundabout, where entering vehicles yield to circulating traffic. To help introduce the new idea to motorists, he would park himself on a traffic island in Peterborough and bark instructions at them through a loud-hailer.

Blackmore’s legacy is undeniable. The UK today boasts 25,000 roundabouts: the most in the world as a proportion of road space. (France has more in total.)

The roads themselves, however, are changing. Congestion is greater. Cyclists are more numerous.

Inside the Civic Centre of Newcastle City Council, head of transport investment Graham Grant spreads out a map of the city’s roads. Accident black-spots are highlighted: an algorithm has ranked roundabouts and junctions according to casualties and injuries. Three roundabouts in the northern Gosforth suburb rank fourth, seventh and 10th worst for injuries caused by moor vehicle collisions. In terms of injuries to cyclists, however, they’re one-two-three.

“Roundabouts are brilliant at moving car traffic, but not a safe space for people who cycle or are crossing on foot,” says Grant, who, mindful of the emotional nature of this issue, is careful to talk of “people who cycle” and “people who drive” rather than “cyclists” and “motorists”. “Our cities have been designed for middle-aged men driving cars, but of all the people who need consideration, they’re not top of the list.”

He favours the “mobility as a service” idea being trialled in Helsinki, where people can hop seamlessly from car to bike to tram.

Grant’s secondary motive in removing roundabouts, however, is traffic control. Roundabouts, he says, cause tailbacks unless the traffic on each approach road is equal. It’s why the axe is swinging over what’s known as Blue House Roundabout. “At morning rush hour, people driving west to east get a free run through [Blue House] roundabout, but those giving way while trying to travel from the north into the city centre face huge tailbacks,” he says. “A roundabout doesn’t give us sufficient control of the network to control priority and demand.”

He clicks play on a video of blinking lights that move across another map of the city. These are cars, captured by number plate recognition. Grant points to large areas that are dark: gaps in his control of the network. “Look here,” he says. “Roundabout, roundabout, roundabout ... we had no control of that corridor of the city. It was a known unknown. Sometimes you can nudge people who drive in a Thaler-and-Sunstein way (authors of the influential book on human behaviour). But sometimes you have to actually intervene. If gaining more control means replacing roundabouts, then that’s the way it has to be.”

Among road chiefs in the US, meanwhile, sentiment towards the roundabout is doing a U-turn. Jeff Shaw, intersections programme manager at the Federal Highways Agency, explains that the better safety record of roundabouts in the US has meant that they are now the default option. “We don’t mandate the construction of roundabouts, but we strongly encourage and incentivise it,” he says.

After a shaky start – some of the early roundabouts were demolished after only a few months, when drivers found them bewildering – the number of roundabouts in the US has doubled in the last decade to around 5,000, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. From just 18 in 2005, New York State now has 112. New York City installed one this summer in the Bronx, at the intersection of Intervale Avenue and Dawson Street.

“Most of the time, roundabouts are a very competitive alternative to other forms of intersection, from both an operational and safety standpoint,” says Shaw. He cites research suggesting that severe crashes – those that result in injury or loss of life, through T-bones caused by cars running red lights – are reduced by 80% when you replace intersections by roundabouts. “The slower speed and angle at which cars approach roundabouts has a profound impact on the severity of any collision that might occur,” says Shaw, who is also convinced that roundabouts move traffic more efficiently. Researchers at Kansas State University found that average delays were 65% less at roundabouts than at signalised intersections.

Who are we to believe? Possibly both. Context appears crucial. Large roundabouts can be made safer and more efficient, concedes Newcastle’s Grant, by adding traffic lights. But that requires space – something that’s less abundant in UK cities. Blue House Roundabout, for example, cannot be expanded: the adjoining land is owned not by the council, but by the Freeman of the City, whose various incarnations have, since Norman times, protected their ancient right to graze cattle there.

But British cities may also be more mindful of cyclists. A surge in the popularity of cycling means that more than two million adults in England now ride bikes at least once a week. And while only one US city, Minneapolis, makes it into the world’s top 20 cycle-friendly cities, many UK cities (Newcastle included) are branding themselves “cycle cities”.

Cyclists have a demonstrably harder time with roundabouts. Research suggests that on large urban roundabouts, cyclist have an injury rate 10-15 times that of motorists. There is a tendency for motorists at roundabouts to look through cyclists while watching for other motor vehicles, hence the frequency of “SMIDSY” (Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you) collisions. And even collisions at slower speeds can be fatal for cyclists.

In Newcastle, the double-roundabout at Haddricks Mill in South Gosforth has achieved notoriety among cyclists for its blind spots, narrow lanes and confusing road markings, as well as the speed and volume of cars, trucks and buses that pass through. Local cycling campaigner Kat Leyendecker calls it “the Mincer”: the site of 14 crashes, with 21 people injured, in the last five years.

These terrifying twin roundabouts are the reason my parents stopped driving to visit us years ago. I don’t attempt to cross on my bicycle. But the council’s proposals to remove them don’t go far enough, argues Leyendecker, who says the council should follow the Dutch approach: separating and protecting space for cyclists in roundabouts.

Typically, Dutch-style roundabouts have a tighter turning radius, which reduces vehicle speeds, and an outside, segregated cycle lane around the circumference. Transport for London and Westminster Council were criticised in April this year when cyclist and designer Moira Gemmill was killed by a truck at the junction of Millbank and Lambeth Bridge – where they had recently shelved plans to install a Dutch-style roundabout, arguing it would slow traffic. Work on a similar design remains under way at the Queens Circus roundabout in north Battersea: it will have segregated cycle lanes, and traffic lights at the points where cyclists cross exit roads. The extra space will be reclaimed by shrinking the roundabout’s central island.

And yet, though everyone wants safer roads and less congestion, these aren’t always the reasons people care about this issue. As Americans know very well, intersections provide street corners – which provide better opportunities for the community and (sometimes even legal) commerce that cluster there.

On the other side, there’s Kevin Beresford.

“Traffic lights are so fascist and dictatorial, telling you when to stop and go,” says Beresford. “Roundabouts are quintessentially English and democratic in their etiquette.”

Beresford is president of the UK Roundabout Appreciation Society, for whom roundabouts promote the virtues of compromise and cooperation. They allow drivers to make their own decisions and assess others’ actions, the society argues, rather than relying on third-party signals. Banishing them to villages, small towns and business parks will leave our cities all the poorer. The group’s Best of British Roundabouts calendar is a bestseller.

Nor should we ignore the virtues of that central island. “They’re not all gyratory galacticos,” Beresford notes. “A roundabout is an oasis in tarmac. It gives councils an opportunity to put a garden in the middle of a road junction.” And all for a fraction of the £60,000 it can cost to install traffic lights.

It’s not unknown for tired campers to pitch their tent on a roundabout. The National Pollinator Strategy for England recognised the valuable role of roundabouts as a resource for bees and other insects, giving wild orchids and cowslips a chance to bloom and spread their pollen. Roundabout islands can be the cheeky hosts to a spot of alfresco dining or even to pop-up restaurants. My children never tire of hearing my wife tell them of childhood picnics on idyllic roundabouts on the Isle of Wight.

That, of course, was the past. What of the future, when our cities’ roads teem with driverless or connected vehicles? “We’re laying the seed for autonomous vehicles,” says Grant of Newcastle’s decision to go with traffic signals. The city is already trialling ambulances equipped with tablets that will turn traffic lights green.

But roundabouts, too, are pretty future-proof, reckons Jeff Shaw of the FHA, whose traffic simulations found that roundabouts would move more self-driving car traffic than signalised intersections. “The future looks good for roundabouts, if and when autonomous vehicles become a reality,” he says. In this circular argument, there’s plenty of road left yet.

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