Details Foul a Decent Idea

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

By Patrick McIlheran
July 16, 2008

We’re getting more of those ring-around-the-intersection roundabouts in metro Milwaukee. They’re quite the fashion - the state requires planners to consider one every time they rebuild major intersections on state highways.

In theory, at least, that’s a good thing.

Though they’re not necessarily popular. Oconomowoc Ald. David Nold, for instance, has been raising questions about a roundabout planned for his city, saying constituents have doubts. “All over the place they’re putting in these roundabouts.

Somebody has this idea that it’s a good thing and they’re pushing it,” Nold told a Journal Sentinel reporter.

Engineers say roundabouts are much safer than other intersections, in part because they make you slow down. Yet they hold an opposing charm: They’re signal-free, so you usually don’t have to stop for them, while you often must, interminably, at red lights. It’s a California stop, legalized and worry-free. So how could Nold dislike them?

He doesn’t dislike them, necessarily. I called him to ask. He doesn’t mind roundabouts, at least in the abstract. Nor is he afraid of them. Those who favor more roundabouts often attribute public resistance to American drivers’ unfamiliarity with them, saying that people just foolishly fear the unknown.

But Nold, who works in downtown Milwaukee, says he drives through the roundabout at 25th and Canal streets regularly. “It’s not a big thing to drive through,” he says, any more than he found it a problem in Boston, a city notorious for them. “It works fine.”

His objection is to the specifics of the Oconomowoc circle - especially that, to build the ring, the state is having to tear down at least three buildings in the middle of his city.

"It's an immense amount of property that was purchased," says Nold, and to his way of thinking, it puts a hole in the city.

He says the intersection wasn't broken: "It was a lot of money spent on something that wasn't needed."

All right, what about another controversial proposal - the one at Barker Road and North Ave. in Brookfield? The stop-signed intersection was, several years ago, slated for a roundabout that ran into flak from neighbors and from officials, including Ald. Steve Ponto.

What's his problem?

Again, it's specifics. Brookfield's goal is to try a roundabout, and Ponto's OK with that. But, he asks, why put in the city's first at the most important intersection on the west side of Brookfield? Also, it would have taken a lot of land near houses, neighbors say it could make a nearby intersection harder to navigate, and the intersection's near attractions - a hospital, the performing arts center - that attract occasional visitors unused to roundabouts.

"Overall, I have an open mind about roundabouts," said Ponto, and he says he was willing to give proponents time to sway residents. But, he says, "the proponents just felt they knew better, and they were going to give this to the people whether they wanted it or not." That attitude frosts him.

It would frost me, and I like roundabouts. Usually, for that kind of patronization, you need to turn to courts - which some pedestrians in suburban Detroit did, successfully. Three disabled men sued the Oakland County Road Commission last winter, saying roundabouts were so dangerous for those with handicaps, they violated federal law.

The problem is that since traffic doesn't stop for a roundabout, blind or wheelchair-using pedestrians have a hard time finding a gap in which to cross. The county settled, agreeing to try out red lights that pedestrians can use to make roundabout traffic come to a halt.

Like, full stop? The thing roundabouts are meant to avoid? Yes, says Craig Bryson, the road commission's spokesman. Engineers haven't yet figured out where to put the lights - too close to the ring itself, and traffic jams ensue.

Bryson points out the light would halt traffic only when a pedestrian pushes the button. Though that sounds like a recipe for fun if any local 14-year-olds get bored or if, say, some Pedestrian Liberation Front tries a little anti-car direct action in the 'burbs, along the lines of those traffic jamming mass rides by militant bicyclists.

Engineers have been looking at the issue already at roundabouts in Colorado and North Carolina.

"This is not just going to happen in Oakland County, but throughout the country," declared triumphant attorney Richard Bernstein last March.

I wish I could think he was wrong, but he's probably not. One little detail changed, and our new highway fashion may suddenly grow more sclerotic. Maybe those people uneasy about roundabouts are onto something.