I realize that most people who work for city and state government are probably very nice and relatively intelligent. After all, I was a bureaucrat once and I didn’t check my brains in at the door. Well, at least I didn’t do that everyday.
But as I am slowly but surely being strangled by a ring of multiple roundabouts, all of which have been planned by the city to be within twenty feet of my front door, I have to wonder whatever happened to the concept of a traffic light.
You old folks out there remember them, right? They had three colors that changed periodically giving all traffic its turn at the intersection. They also cost one heckuva lot less to install and maintain that the cost of building a roundabout. But it seems as though somewhere along the way, our city has become absolutely enamored of these fun monstrosities and decided that my little section of South Anchorage was the perfect spot to install all of them.
Given our economic climate, I must express some surprise that we are building these costly beasts with such frequency as opposed to putting in a simple traffic light. I am also amazed at the places chosen for a roundabout.
Not far from my house is an intersection at 100th Street and Victor that handles traffic from Dimond Blvd. and Minnesota Drive. At what passes for rush hour in Anchorage, it’s a very busy place. There are twelve lanes plus turning lanes trying to maneuver through.
Yet despite the amount of traffic it handles, the intersection is controlled by a four-way stop sign system. You have no idea how much fun that is until you sit there and watch people either try to remember the protocol for four-way stops or just figure they’re in a truck so they’ll take their turn whenever they want.
One block away from this intersection is a roundabout that handles streets coming off a quiet residential area. For the whole time that roundabout was being built I wanted to go there, tap one of the workers on the shoulder and suggest they’d missed their mark by a block.
When the new roundabout is complete, there will be two roundabouts within three blocks of each other coming south on C Street. The one at C and O’Malley makes sense. That had been a highway interrupted by a red light. The roundabout allows highway traffic to continue without breaking speed for at least another block before it comes to… yes, you guessed, a red light.
I know there are traffic planners out there with all kinds of designs and numbers and concepts about why traffic circles are better than the invention of pizza. One of the main reasons I hear constantly is that a roundabout forces traffic to slow down. Well, I may be wrong about this, but so does a red light. And I’ve got to guess it’s more cost efficient.
But the best part of all when roundabouts enter your life is the excitement it adds to driving in Anchorage. Not that Anchorage needs more road excitement. Between moose, potholes, giant trucks that think they own the road and drivers who think it’s safe to turn right on a red light while sipping coffee, talking on the phone and writing notes on a work order, most Alaskan drivers have all the excitement they can stand.
While it is true that the average driver will eventually figure out how to navigate the roundabout in summer when all the arrows are showing and they’ve had enough practice, there is always one driver who is clearly entering the roundabout for the first time and has not a clue as to where to be or what to do. You drive defensively in fear of this driver’s sudden lane changes and exits.
Come winter, that driver is inevitably joined by the drivers who can’t seem to remember what they learned in the summer now that the snows of winter cover up all the directional arrows painted on the road.
Yeah, I couldn’t be more thrilled that yet another roundabout is coming my way. It brings back wonderful memories of riding bumper cars on the Million Dollar Pier in Atlantic City when I was growing up – just slightly more dangerous.