Darlene and I decided to indulge and take in some German food in Bragg Creek tonight. On the way, I noticed that they've finally done something about this awful intersection of 2 secondary highways southwest of Calgary. They installed a traffic circle. After having spent a few weeks in the UK in September, I'm sure you know that I am totally impressed with the 'roundabout'. So I am thrilled that they gave a circle a try in this case. It works like a charm. It will be interesting to see if the accident rate decreases now.We do have traffic circles in other places in Calgary, but they're all in low speed residential areas. This is the first circle I know of (in Alberta) at the intersection of 2 high speed roads.
2 comments:
For what it's worth, there have been already two motor vehicle collisions directly attributable to the design and placement of this roundabout since it was opened - one within 24 hours. Neither involved serious injury but both involved total vehicle losses. As a local emergency responder, I am confident that this trend will continue, especially with the truck traffic that tries to negotiate the tight, 30-meter radius single-lane turn. If truckers can't manage to stay on the ramp from eastbound #1 to southbound #22 (where I respond to at least one rollover a month), they're not going to be able to navigate this roundabout any easier. And once its single lane gets blocked, there is no opportunity for detour.
The appropriate upgrade to that intersection should have been traffic signals, as I recommended in a letter to the government in 2003, but then-Infrastructure Minister Ed Stelmach said traffic signals were inappropriate because people do not expect to have to come to a stop on rural highways. (I don't know what he thought the stop sign at the end of #8 was for, then.) Finally, of the 7 roundabouts installed in Edmonton, 2 of them have been returned to standard intersections with traffic signals, and the remaining 5 include the top 3 worst collision-prone intersections in Edmonton.
Thanks for your feedback. It's nice to have someone chime in who has their finger on the pulse of the situation. I had no idea that the circle(s) had problems.
I wonder - is the problem that we can't adapt to traffic circles or is it that the circles are poorly designed. They seem to work very well in the UK.
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