A roundabout way to a safer highway

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/06/2023 (863 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most of us have to do it sooner or later. We sit, waiting and concentrating hard, looking intently to the left. For those with poor spatial acuity or lack of experience, trying to judge the right time can create intense fear. For others, adrenaline is raised. For both, frustrating waits can lead to risk-taking.

I am talking, of course, about crossing, at grade, a major divided highway that has a high speed limit.

Trying to judge the approach of an oncoming vehicle and assessing whether we can mechanically sprint across to the comparative safety of the median can be really tough, and not for the faint of heart. Is the heat haze affecting my judgment? Is the car passing that semi speeding at 120 km/h? And if I am driving a long vehicle, will the back stick out if I have to stop on the median?

Then, something we never think about — if, heaven forbid, my vehicle stalls halfway across, can that oncoming behemoth stop in time?

Then we get to do it all again from the temporary refuge of the median, this time looking intently to the right across a leaning-back passenger, perhaps with the sun in our eyes too. Is this a modern form of medieval torture?

The terrible crash at Carberry has shaken us all, leaving in its wake compassion, sorrow and, for some, a life-changing crushing misery. But in me, a new emotion is rising — blazing anger. Anger that in the year 2023 we still have an antiquated road system on which it is possible for such tragedies to occur. It is beyond an outrage.

I know all the old tired arguments — traffic lights are oh-so-primitive and wreck the flow of traffic moving hundreds of kilometres across the continent. And as for flyovers, the expense! So we continue to dither and procrastinate when all along there is a proven, highly effective solution that costs far less to build and far less to maintain than a flyover of any sort.

Let me take a quick detour for a moment. In contrast to my first scary scenario, how do you feel about turning right from a side road onto Main Street or Portage Avenue or some other city highway? Or, better still, onto a one-way street? There are still things to watch for, such as oncoming vehicles transferring to the curb lane, but it’s much easier, isn’t it? The primary reason is that speeds are far lower which, even in an unknown town or city, generates so much less anxiety. Some distance later, if you want to turn off to the right, that’s pretty simple too. Signalling, you move into the far-right lane and then simply turn off. It is even easier if there are no pedestrians or sidewalk cyclists to worry about.

Now imagine a large, a really large, circular one-way street that you enter by yielding and always leave on the right. Its radius is so large that even the biggest tractor-trailers do not straddle lanes. That is a solution for junctions like those at Carberry and it’s called — drum roll please — a roundabout. Not the wimpy little things you find on Waterfront Drive in Winnipeg or in back streets. This is a highly evolved management system for light to medium-heavy traffic densities that has been picked apart and dissected by engineers ever since its invention by a French architect, Eugene Henard, in 1877. The modern “yield-at-entry” version dates from 1966 in the United Kingdom. You look left, always left, yielding to enter the one-way street as you can, and move into the right lane to leave it. By some accounts there are over 10,000 in the U.K. and they contribute to that country having half as many traffic deaths per capita as Canada (according to the World Health Organization).

Over the years, numerous safety features have been added: tangential (or “flared”) entry deflects and automatically slows drivers to about 50 km/h while preventing wrong-way travel; raised central mounds (with flowerbeds?) prevent dazzle and safely arrest drunk drivers who plow into them; illuminated one-way chevron signs aid with night travel, etc. And if the traffic becomes extremely heavy over a week or two in summer, stop lights can even be added as a last resort so that no one waits forever to enter.

If you think this is a “European thing” and would never work here, the U.S. Department of Transportation disagrees with you, and has done so since 1995 when it published a detailed safety analysis called “Roundabouts: A Direct Way to Safer Highways” that is available online. It contains photos of bad and good designs, and also accident analyses and plentiful references. A basic good design is shown in the illustration and plenty of other examples can be found in the American article and on the web.

Of course, all this is useless if drivers are not properly educated in the correct use of roundabouts. The U.K. had to address this issue in the days of its European Union membership as the number of European drivers increased, and the result was a set of well-designed advance signs that leave no doubt as to how you proceed. These include: prior warnings of a roundabout ahead; lane instructions (“Get in lane”); countdown markers, which are useful in fog; a diagram of the roundabout — an example is shown; and chevrons to indicate direction and confirmatory exit signs. And finally, if you miss your exit, you are not out of luck. You simply go round the roundabout again!

Why don’t we have all this? It has been known for years and has been proven in numerous studies to save lives. Is it inertia, ignorance, parochialism, lack of study of modern road engineering, or do we simply not care enough to take reasonable steps to protect people? Saving money is all well and good, but I wonder how Dauphin feels about that at the moment? And even worse, how the next community will feel when it happens again because no one got off their derrière?

David Hoult is a retired engineering physicist with a keen interest in driving. He has driven on three continents and in 16 different countries and is the author of a book for North Americans on driving in the U.K. and Ireland.