Roundabouts: Traffic boon or bane?

CARMEL, Ind. -- An international group of 380 has come here from as far away as Japan and Australia to study the roundabout in a city with the highest concentration of them in the nation.

They also are here with a message: Roundabouts are an engineering breakthrough that saves lives. And, as they see it, their host city with 68 roundabouts and counting is more than a tony suburb of Indianapolis -- it's a vision of the future.

"Any time I get a chance to visit Roundabout City, I try to make the most of it," said Howard McCullough, a state highway engineer who carries the title of roundabout specialist for New York. "Coming from New York, where the Department of Transportation is considered to be one of the more advanced when it comes to our roundabout program, it is a little humbling to visit a city with as many roundabouts as we have statewide."

The conference, which concludes Friday, began with a keynote address from Mayor Jim Brainard.

He saw his first roundabout as an exchange student in England and built Carmel's first during his first term as mayor in 1999.

"Even when I was a student, I thought the roundabouts worked better than the traffic lights," Brainard said. "Traffic seemed to flow better because no cars were stopping."

From that moment on, Brainard was a convert. Carmel -- population 79,000 -- has begun work on its 69th roundabout and will build three others this summer.

Japan has fewer than 100 roundabouts in the entire country.

"We need to do more to introduce roundabouts to the public," said Hideki Nakamura, a Nagoya University professor who led a contingent of 14 Japanese engineers and academics.

"As we (build) more across the country, we'll be able to put what we're learning here into practice."

The discussion has changed since the Transportation Research Board organized the first conference in Vail, Colo., in 2005.

"When we first started, the big question was, 'Do roundabouts really work?' Now it's a nonissue. We know they do," said Philip Demosthenes, the board's research chairman.

It's easy: Roundabouts slow down the traffic and, in the event of an accident, are very forgiving.

According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, they reduce accidents by 40%, injuries by nearly 80% and fatalities by 90% when replacing intersections with a traffic light or stop sign.

With about 2,000 roundabouts, the U.S. still trails much of Europe as well as Australia. Since the 1970s, more than 5,000 have been built in the city of Melbourne alone.

"In Australia, if an intersection has a history of crashes, there's no debate. They just put in a roundabout," said Andy O'Brien, the Australian traffic consultant whose 1985 magazine article -- five years before the first was built in Arizona -- made him the unofficial prophet of the American roundabout.

In 1970, 1,061 people were killed on roads in the Australian state of Victoria -- and then the roundabouts began to appear.

"Two years ago," O'Brien said, "that number had dropped to 303, even though the population more than doubled in that time."

The issue now is how to sell them beyond Australia. Demosthenes said Carmel offers the perfect example.

"Successful cities first put them in noncritical locations that allow people to get over their nervousness," he said. "Once you take the mystery out of them, people feel more confident.

"The first time they go through, they're probably not going to like it. But the fifth or sixth time, they realize it's not that bad."