Roundabout Appreciation Society

[Bobbi Keppel]

Yes, there is one. Headquarters in England. Head honcho refers to himself as Lord Of The Rings. “Freakenomics” on Maine Public played a radio segment about roundabouts on 3/27/21 that was very interesting. (no doubt available as a podcast.) Clear explanations of the differences between roundabouts and rotaries with accompanying statistics for users. Carmel, Indiana has the most/capita and Mayor Brainard is a devotee because, compared with traffic lights, they are cheaper to build and maintain, cut down an enormous amount of pollution. and reduce accidents and deaths. Rotaries aren’t as safe but they do keep traffic moving and have other advantages over traffic lights.

Bobbi

[George Rheault]

[I meant to send this way back and realized I never did!]

Thank you Bobbi for the excellent suggestion.  Here is the podcast you mentioned:

Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished? (Ep. 454) - Freakonomics Freakonomics

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/roundabouts/

As the Mayor of Carmel, Indiana mentioned, this suburb of Indianapolis has grown enormously (from ~25,000 in 1996 to over 101,000 people now). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmel,_Indiana  (BTW: basically all at the expense of center-city Indianapolis).

But at least that explosive growth allowed them to build out some brand-new infrastructure smartly.  It is kind of like when cell-phone networks first appeared and the developing world (Asia, Africa, Latin America) actually had better cell-phone infrastructure than many parts of the USA.  That was due to being hobbled with the double cost of maintaining all the existing and lower-performing incumbent infrastructure while ramping up to find the resources to build out a new, better generation of technology.  That is exactly what Portland is struggling with now.  It has been a hugely expensive (and LONG) expedition to build the USM roundabout and it will take a very long time for it to pay for itself in terms of benefits.

On Tue, Mar 30, 2021 at 3:03 PM Bobbi Keppel <bob...@gwi.net> wrote:

Yes, there is one. Headquarters in England. Head honcho refers to himself as Lord Of The Rings. “Freakenomics” on Maine Public played a radio segment about roundabouts on 3/27/21 that was very interesting. (no doubt available as a podcast.) Clear explanations of the differences between roundabouts and rotaries with accompanying statistics for users. Carmel, Indiana has the most/capita and Mayor Brainard is a devotee because, compared with traffic lights, they are cheaper to build and maintain, cut down an enormous amount of pollution. and reduce accidents and deaths. Rotaries aren’t as safe but they do keep traffic moving and have other advantages over traffic lights.

Bobbi

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