Mondays with Mike: In a roundabout way…

Back when we could still do such things, we took Wisconsin Highway 26 on the last leg of our journeys to visit our son Gus in Watertown. A few years ago, the State of Wisconsin redid a stretch of that highway: Lanes were added and eventually, instead of a ramp and a traffic light, we took a ramp and a … roundabout … and after that, another roundabout instead of a second traffic light.

Carmel, Indiana is proud of its roundabouts, as it should be.

It was a bit jarring at first, but I’ve come to love the things. I’ve found I’m not alone, and for very good reason: roundabouts make tons of sense.

This I learned during a typical Sunday radio day, when Beth and I listen to On the Media and then Freakonomics Radio on WBEZ, our local NPR affiliate. I’m pretty sure I could just listen to both those programs once a week without any other news media and not be the worse for it.

Anyway, Freakonomics is hosted by Steven Dubner, the co-author of the enormously popular “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” The other author was Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago.

The radio show takes measure and novel looks at about…everything, all through the lens of economics. Yesterday they focused on roundabouts!

The episode is titled “Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished?” and by the time it was over, my answer was pretty much, “Absolutely.”

For one thing, they’re safe. From a transcript of the episode:

As we noted earlier, about a quarter of all crash fatalities happen at intersections. So how do roundabout and non-roundabout intersections differ on fatalities? Looking at U.S. crash data from 2017 to 2019, you see that 0.1 percent of crashes at roundabouts result in a death. That could be the death of a driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist, anyone. 0.1-percent: that’s 1 death per 1,000 crashes at roundabouts. Okay, and how about your standard, four-way intersection, with traffic lights or stop signs? The death rate there is 0.4 percent, or 4 deaths per 1,000 crashes.

Jim Brainard, the Mayor of Carmel, Indiana, an Indianapolis suburb (and—who knew?—the epicenter of the U.S. roundabout movement) says it’s simple:

Roundabouts are smaller and because they’re smaller, everybody has to drive through them slowly. It’s about speed.

But there’s more. Because vehicles don’t sit and idle at stop signs or lights, roundabouts save energy and reduce carbon emissions.

From the transcript:

Studies by transportation scholars have found that converting a standard intersection to a roundabout does significantly cut fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Transportation scholars point to yet another advantage of roundabouts: smoother traffic. Now, that might seem counterintuitive — at least it did to me when I first looked at this research. You’d think that the slow speed required by a roundabout — which is good for safety — would be bad for traffic flow. But the data say otherwise. The data say that roundabouts reduce congestion.

That’s because traffic lights are programmed for maximum efficiency for a small window of time—morning rush plus evening rush. The rest of the time not so much.

In addition, traffic never just stops. It slows, but it flows. A friend of ours who spends a lot of time in Door County, a major tourist draw from Wisconsin and Chicagoland, told me the roundabout up there made an enormous difference. It used to be that traffic would back up a mile or more at a key stoplight intersection. Not so anymore.

The episode of Freakonomics is brilliant, especially if, like me, you have ever wondered about just how much a traffic signal costs, how much it weighs, and other geeky stuff. Give it a listen.

If not, well, drive safely.

P.S. Roundabouts and rotaries are not the same thing.