EDITORIAL: Tips for driving a roundabout

Good luck! Be sure there will be plenty of accidents, citizen complaints, damage to the curbs and any folliage, and you will see as we did in our community, roundabouts are a bad idea other than in other countries where the vehicles are smaller and drivers are used to them over many generations of use. Even a worse idea on main intersections, roundabouts will cause confusion and delays at best. You will find large trucks just cutting across much of the roundabout, unable to make the tight turns in time. Then there is the icey road scenario, where drivers just slam into the roundabout or spin out tring to negotiate the tight turn without stopping at a stop sign first! Be sure to put more than half the budget away to remove the roundabout in a year or so, re-pave, put in stop lights and pay some law suits!

I go to the police station four days a week to get reports, and I can only recall one accident reported by HPD since the roundabout opened. If there have been others, perhaps they've been so minor that police haven't been called.

There were two times in early September when trucks with oversized loads had difficulty passing through.

I did hear of a semi rollover this morning, before sun-up, at the new roundabout on State Highway 7 and Carver County 10. I haven't heard the details yet.

I'm not sure how much "education" is needed to navigate a simple single-lane, two-road roundabout. But my own experience has been they beat the alternative — stop lights — which can, and are, ignored quite often by people running them.

(Terry Davis is a Hutchinson Leader staff writer. E-mail him at davis@hutchinsonleader.com.)

Was there any data collected on volume of use at that intersection before the round about and now, after. I saw some cars/ a school bus on the dirt by pass that made me wonder how many are just avoiding it all together.

And mneng, that is the basic problem, whether people are using roundabouts or driving in any setting. I've started to think that some new vehicles must not come with turn signals as standard equipment as so few people bother to use their's.

I walk the trail along Jefferson Street regularly, so that puts me in the position of observing traffic at both the Jefferson/Century and Jefferson/Edmonton intersections. My observation is that only about one in 10 vehicles actually come to a complete stop at those intersections. It is totally amazing to see vehicles on Century coming up to a T-intersection and not even coming close to stopping, especially when turning LEFT to go north on Jefferson. Many drivers treat the stop signs as if they are yield signs. They look both ways and if they don't see anyone, they blow on through the stop sign. Someone is going to miss a vehicle in their windshield pillar blind spot someday and someone else is going to pay for that mistake. Car drivers seem only slightly more likely to stop at these two intersections than drivers of large vehicles. Perhaps pickup and SUV drivers feel more invulnerable and are less concerned about a collision.

Last week, I saw a small, black car driven by a younger male driver turn off of Adams Street by 3M to go west on Oakland and blow completely through the stop sign on Jefferson Street. He was actually accelerating as he approached and went through the intersection and on up the hill toward Oakland Cemetery probably doing 40 mph.

Since there appears to be plenty of bad driving elsewhere, I think you'll see a certain about of bad driving at roundabouts, too.

(Terry Davis is a Hutchinson Leader staff writer. E-mail him at davis@hutchinsonleader.com.)

This is not new. This is has been the crux of the problem from the beginning. Drivers who do not follow traffic laws are a menace. Someone decided the round-about was our best solution to deadly accidents. It had traffic flow benefits, but those could have been dealt with much cheaper. What no one could do is make drivers follow the rules. The round about is supposed to keep we the innocent, that get rammed by negligent drivers, alive. Sadly the world cannot be idiot proofed. Read the posts about under age drinking if you need more evidence.