21/28 December 2019 | New Scientist | 67It’s incredible and cheap and it does work
fantastically well as opposed to traffic lights.”
That wasn’t immediately obvious:
Blackmore is said to have stood in the
middle of the first of the new roundabouts
in Peterborough and personally directed
traffic movements. But his concept has
since conquered large parts of the world.
Australia now has some 10,000 modern-style
roundabouts of all sizes. France has taken to
them with particular élan, leading the world
with an estimated 32,000.
The US, meanwhile, has been on an
alternative route to splendid isolation.
With more space to play with and fewer
of the fiddly, irregular intersections of
the old world, it fell in love with simple
controlled junctions. “You basically
developed a mindset over generations
of engineers to start with a stop-controlled
intersection, and if that doesn’t work, you
go to a traffic signal,” says Rodegerdts.
It took a man with tunnel-visioned
determination to change things. Impressed
with what he had seen in Europe, in 1986 US
engineer Leif Ourston enlisted Blackmore’s
help to reintroduce the roundabout to US soil.
“In 1941, Sir Winston Churchill asked America
to join Britain in a struggle to protect
democracy,” he wrote in a letter to Blackmore.
“We joined you and together we triumphed.
Now, 45 years later, I am calling upon you to
help me with a difficult struggle in which we
are both engaged. We are trying to bring the
British-style roundabout to the western
hemisphere.”
The pair toured California attempting to sell
the concept, but to little avail. Transportation
departments refused to believe that they could
be safer. Fire departments warned they would
be an obstacle to emergency vehicles. Most
of all, polls showed that the roundabout’s
underlying principle – yielding passage to
circulating vehicles smoothly and according
to your own judgement, rather than following
a stop sign or traffic light – made the public
angry and confused.
Ourston’s big break came in 1990, with
permission to build two Blackmore-style
roundabouts in a new development in the
Las Vegas Valley. That, and other pioneering
examples, started to prove that roundabouts
could operate safely and improve traffic flows.
In 1996, Rodegerdts, then a rookie engineer,
was invited to help produce the first guide to
roundabout design for the FHWA.
Part of the task in promoting wider adoption
of roundabouts in the US is to overcome the
innate conservatism of engineers there, says
Rodegerdts. “They want to have something
that’s proven, and they need to see it with their
own eyes to believe it.” Then there is lingering
public scepticism. “One of the first things we
tend to hear is that ‘people don’t know how
to yield in my community’,” says Shaw.
Still, the idea is catching on. In recent years,
more state and local governments keen to
build roundabouts have started to approach
the FHWA for help convincing sceptical voters.
One response has been to institute a
“National Roundabouts Week” in which the
roundabout-friendly take to social media toshare positive experiences. The second
one was held in September 2019. “Let people
kind of absorb it, you know, in a general sense,
just to hear more about them, to learn more
about them,” says Shaw.
From just a few hundred maybe a decade
ago, Rodegerdts’s numbers suggest something
like 5000 roundabouts are now spread across
the US. He is cautiously optimistic things are
turning the corner. “It’s still very uneven,
some areas are still much more roundabout-
accepting than others,” he says.Round and round it goes
The US capital of roundabouts is Carmel,
Indiana, which now has more than 100 – and
proudly bangs the drum for their introduction.
But about 20 per cent of states now have a
policy of looking to see whether a roundabout
might be the best solution for an intersection,
says Rodegerdts – and often find they are.
The irony is that, in the UK, things are
starting to turn the other way. Increased traffic
has encouraged the building of ever bigger,
multi-lane roundabouts that are an obstacle
to pedestrians and a mortal danger to cyclists
(amen to that). In some circles, a movement
away from roundabouts is seen as a way to
break the tyranny of the motor car.
Increasingly, too, high traffic volumes have
undermined the whole free-flowing point
of the roundabout, forcing planners to
introduce traffic signals on roundabouts so
that continuously circulating traffic doesn’t
stop people ever getting on.
Or indeed off. If Clark Griswold’s travails
on the Lambeth roundabout exemplified the
US’s bemused relationship with the concept
three decades ago, they have proved an
unexpected boon for the pro-roundabout
faction today. “Anytime there’s a Facebook
page dedicated to a proposed roundabout,
it’s almost a given that somebody will post
the GIF of the scene from that movie,”
says Shaw. “We’ve been able to turn that
around as a great talking point and say, you
know what, this is not what we’re building.”
The notoriety seems to have stung someone
in London, too. Transport for London, the body
responsible for the city’s key junctions, has
plans to replace the Lambeth roundabout –
with a four-way signalled intersection. ❚Left: Columbus Circle
in New York was
probably the first
roundabout. Below
left: there are many
ways to traverse the
“Magic Roundabout”
in Swindon, UKRichard Webb is the executive
editor of New Scientist. He’ll be
back round again in a minute
PA
W
IRE/PAIMAGES