Baltimore wants more roundabouts

Maryland’s Congressional representatives are being asked to insert $22.8 million of earmarks into the current federal transportation bill so that roundabouts can be built at five locations on busy Baltimore traffic corridors. The request, by Mayor Sheila Dixon’s administration, marks a new embrace of roundabouts by the 786,000-population city, which currently has just two modern traffic circles.

The Maryland Highway Administration has built 65 to 70 modern roundabouts on state highways since 1993, when it installed its first in Lisbon in Howard County. Maryland’s county governments have built hundreds more.

“The traffic circles are unpopular with many drivers, some of whom believe they are more dangerous than conventional intersections,” The Baltimore Sun reported in a front-page article May 24. Yet they have an overwhelmingly positive safety record. “There has never been a fatal accident at an intersection that has been replaced with a roundabout,” the Sun reported.

Crashes have decreased by 60 percent at locations where roundabouts were installed. Serious injuries have fallen 85 percent. Highway engineers note that the design of the contemporary roundabouts makes it almost impossible to have a head-on or T-bone crash.

Why so much driver resistance, then? Some motorists find the new traffic pattern confusing. Drivers in roundabouts sometimes stop when they see another vehicle entering, even though vehicles already in the rotary have the right of way. A roundabout in Towson that was built with a more oval shape (allowing vehicles to go faster than in a typical roundabout) proved especially challenging to drivers, and has been redesigned since being constructed in 1998.

Randall Scott, Chief of Baltimore’s traffic division, said the city has been slow to adopt roundabouts until now because of its “older urban setting” and because of the volume of underground infrastructure that would have to be disturbed. The state Highway Administration said construction of roundabouts costs the state about $1.5 to $2 million per project. That’s more than the approximately $200,000 cost of a state-of-the-art signal. However, roundabouts save on operating costs by reducing maintenance.

Also, the need to dispatch emergency crews is reduced, since injury-causing accidents are fewer. If Baltimore gets the federal funds, some of the future roundabouts would likely be two lanes wide and others would be one lane.