Roundabouts AKA Traffic Circles

Higley Groves has some roundabouts on the northern side of the community; here is a picture of one on a busy (?) Saturday morning. The subject came up because of this article in the East Valley Tribune about Queen Creek looking into roundabouts:

Maricopa County is looking into solving Queen Creek’s traffic problem by running motorists around in circles. County transportation officials have hired a consultant to research the possibility of placing roundabouts at four major
intersections along Ellsworth Road south of downtown. Roundabouts — interchanges in which traffic signals are replaced with a circular path for switching directions — aren’t unheard-of in Arizona, but four of them in a row at one-mile intervals would be a first for the East Valley.

When Morrison Ranch was still in its conceptual phase, we talked a lot about traffic circles. We have some long streets that we wanted to break up with landscaping and at the same time slow down the traffic. A roundabout is perfect for these needs; but it needs to be fairly large to be effective. The Fire Department wanted them to be very tiny in circumference so they could easily maneuver their trucks around them, but a tiny roundabout completely defeats the purpose - people just speed on through. There is a roundabout in Scottsdale at Via Linda that exemplifies this problem; and it is the precise intersection used by the Fire Dept. to illustrate why traffic circles don't work, and also to point out that people don't really know how to use them.

Now Queen Creek thinks traffic circles might be an answer to their needs; I'm sure there will be much discussion about the topic, along the lines cited above. Hopefully, they can come to a good, safe conclusion. (The town leader and influencers of Queen Creek said several years ago that they didn't want what happened to Gilbert to happen to them. The Mister says they got their wish; what is happening to them is much much worse than what happened to Gilbert. The growth is coming, indeed is here, and their infrastructure is far behind. Gilbert has sewers that work, arterial roads that are not 2 lane county roads, and police and fire departments, to name a few areas of concern for Queen Creek.)

Back to Morrison Ranch; after some compromise, our traffic circles went in, a little smaller than we planned, but the fire trucks are well able to get around them. The landscaping is a nice break in the long road, most folks drive at least as slow as they do on the straight path, and I haven't seen anyone going the wrong way around yet. Of course, we don't get a lot of traffic in these circles, at least not on Saturday mornings.