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The People's Court- "Ruining a Truck" Part 1 [Ruptured fuel lines ...

Roundabouts

I actually like roundabouts – when they are located in appropriate places and properly designed. Unfortunately, I do not believe either is the case with this particular project. I believe this particular design will make the traffic problems worse during peak periods, and more importantly, create much more danger for the children who need to cross those intersections, given that this area has the greatest concentration of school buildings in our district. Kids walking to/from Hilliard Station 6

For those who have not heard about this project, here's the simple explanation: The two intersections at Main St and Cemetery Rd and Main St and Scioto-Darby Rd are going to be replaced by two roundabouts. At the same time, the "Y" intersection just west of there where Cemetery Rd and Scioto Darby Rd is being reworked to become a 90° intersection with a traffic light. The City of Hilliard has published a Frequently Asked Questions page that provides many more details, and a lot of opinion presented as fact.

One of the arguments in favor of roundabouts is that they're safer precisely because they force drivers to engage and think about what is going on around them, something that isn't quite so necessary when an intersection is controlled by standard traffic lights. While I believe this to be true, I suspect that this argument was made in the days before cell phones and texting, two practices which make driving in general more dangerous (especially for motorcycle riders like me!), and especially so at intersections where the traffic never stops.

While not a traffic engineer, I have been involved in data telecommunications all my adult life, and the problems of auto traffic engineering and data traffic engineering are remarkably similar. The closest equivalent to a roundabout in a data network is a router . A router receives data from many incoming data streams, sorts the streams by destination, and sends them on via the appropriate path. , when so much data traffic is coming to the router that it is unable to keep up. When that happens, one of more of the incoming streams has to be stopped until the congestion clears, causing users of the network to experience delays and sometimes interruptions. While working for the largest network operator on the planet, UUNET, we saw a couple of occasions when congestion became so bad that entire sections of the country had service disruptions as the congestion problem propagated out from the original source, just as happens when there is a big wreck on I-270 and lots of people bail out to the surface streets, congesting them as well.

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