Really, Seriously, Roundabouts cut down on Traffic Accidents like Nothing

Really, Seriously, Roundabouts cut down on Traffic Accidents like Nothing Else

Do you remember the Chevy Chase movie National Lampoon's European Vacation in which Chase, driving his family around London, gets on the Lambeth Bridge roundabout and doesn't know how to get off? He goes around and around the roundabout all day until it turns him into a giggling maniac. The traffic circle isn't really a common sight in America - only about 30 states even have them. Lots of drivers, having not been adequately made familiar with the charms of this European import, can find they feel a a stab of anxiety when they happen to come across one. They find the angle of entry quite strange and they can never be completely sure of whom exactly to yield to. Traffic engineers in this country think to install roundabouts on our roads as a way to help bring down occurrences of traffic accidents on our roads. Do they really work? Or do drivers hopelessly lose the plot once they get on a roundabout and actually cause accidents?

You might be surprised to learn this, but municipalities and states across the country are discovering that roundabouts let a lot more traffic through than any other inexpensive solution to managing traffic at a crossing (and they help cut down on the pollution that occurs when traffic moves slowly). And they do this with far fewer traffic accidents caused. Certain types of traffic accidents that can be especially fearsome - a T-Bone crash for example - can occur only at regular crossings with traffic signals and not at roundabouts. Cars get rear-ended a lot less too. While America has acquired about 2000 new roundabouts over the past 20 years, it is still nothing compared to the way every small European country has about 20,000. Cities across the country are beginning to take notice and are installing them by the dozen. And they typically find that roundabouts on average take down the number of traffic accidents they have by about 10%.

If you really hate roundabouts, you aren't going to like what's coming. The insurance Institute of Highway Safety has put its seal of approval on having the country build more roundabouts everywhere. That 10% figure for how roundabouts help with cutting down on our traffic accidents is only a general figure for municipal districts as a whole. For individual crossings, that switch from a signal-based traffic management system to a roundabout-based one, the improvement is dramatic and startling. The number is 40% for accidents at individual roundabouts. As for injury causing accidents, they go down about 80%. Is that magic, or what?

Hopefully, in about 20 years, there'll be so many roundabouts all over the country that when people watch that old Chevy Chase movie, they won't understand what his problem was.

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