“Gyratory” Roundabouts: Proof of Increasing Civilization?
Landscape Architecture magazine just issued their 100-year anniversary issue. It includes a reprint of the very first issue from October, 1910. The very first article is titled “Street-Traffic Studies”, by Frederick Law Olmsted. The focus is on comparison of intersection design alternatives based first on the number of potential “collision points.”
One alternative “seeks to obviate the difficulties of the junction of four or more roads by a gyratory system of regulating traffic…”, or what is referred to as a roundabout. But Olmsted concludes that a roundabout would work well only at light traffic intersections and with little or no police control “provided the drivers could possibly be induced to turn out of their direct way in order to gyrate without being compelled to do so by the police.”
But at heavy traffic intersections, “it would seem clear that the prompt and orderly regulation of which vehicle is to give way for the other cannot possibly be effected under such conditions, even by a large number of policemen, as well as can be done single-handed on the ordinary crossing.”
In other words, “the best crossing is a four-way crossing nearly at right angles.”
In 1910, there were 458,500 registered vehicles in the United States. In 2010, there are 246,000,000 cars on US roads.
We wonder what Olmsted would say about this “Magic Roundabout” in Swindon, England. Built in 1972, it has five “mini-roundabouts” arranged in a circle. In 2009 it was voted the fourth scariest junction in Britain:
