So, roundabouts, as we have noted here, are rapidly being embraced all across North America because they are 30 percent less polluting and 20 percent more efficient, considerably safer and they're more aesthetically pleasant and they do not necessarily require any more space to build than an old style intersection.
People like them more, as one Canadian study has demonstrated: "A significant finding was that public opinion was consistently positive after installation of roundabouts."
And yet, as the same study notes, cities often just have any mechanism that requires them to consider installing them: "Almost all of the respondents had no formal policy in place for considering roundabouts."
Places around North America - Arizona, North Carolina, Winnipeg, and everywhere else - are retrofitting old four-way stops/traffic light style intersections with this safer system that has a European-look while we - purportedly the most European of North American cities - keep putting in old style traffic lights.
Arizona, for example, went from five to 40 roundabouts between 2005-2010 and surely have even more now.
Other places are increasingly looking like Rome and Paris, with attractive tree-laden centre islands where concrete chaos and fearful left-turns once reigned while Montreal insists on looking like Thunder Bay with its old style corners.
There are 35 percent fewer crashes and 90 percent fewer fatalities at intersections that employ roundabouts, so the undemocratic insistence of local city traffic planners to snub this option is actually a matter of life and death and considerable economic importance.
Rejecting roundabouts is so illogical and fishy that it should be probed at the Charbonneau Commission on corruption in the construction industry.
And yet Montreal's city planners keep putting more and more four way stop/traffic lights into new intersections.
In a few blocks of where I live, traffic planners have recently ordered bad, old style intersections with traffic lights installed at Crowley and Upper Lachine, St. James just east of St. Remi, Old Orchard just north of Upper Lachine, Belgrade and St. James old style corners that require people to wait unnecessarily, usually for no reason whatsoever.
Meanwhile places like posh, upscale, well-loved Nun's Island have installed many roundabouts and still don't have a single traffic light on the entire island.
Yet St. Anne de Bellevue recently proposed to add one a dinosaur-era traffic light to deal with a road issue just a week ago, something the new mayor doesn't seem too thrilled about.
So with evidence of massive incompetence by Quebec's various city traffic planners, it's time to formalize a new system that would require more public input to defend against further bad traffic choices.
one on old
People like them more, as one Canadian study has demonstrated: "A significant finding was that public opinion was consistently positive after installation of roundabouts."
And yet, as the same study notes, cities often just have any mechanism that requires them to consider installing them: "Almost all of the respondents had no formal policy in place for considering roundabouts."
Places around North America - Arizona, North Carolina, Winnipeg, and everywhere else - are retrofitting old four-way stops/traffic light style intersections with this safer system that has a European-look while we - purportedly the most European of North American cities - keep putting in old style traffic lights.
Arizona, for example, went from five to 40 roundabouts between 2005-2010 and surely have even more now.
Other places are increasingly looking like Rome and Paris, with attractive tree-laden centre islands where concrete chaos and fearful left-turns once reigned while Montreal insists on looking like Thunder Bay with its old style corners.
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| Asheville N.C. built this safer, faster, more attractive roundbout in the same space as a normal intersection |
Rejecting roundabouts is so illogical and fishy that it should be probed at the Charbonneau Commission on corruption in the construction industry.
And yet Montreal's city planners keep putting more and more four way stop/traffic lights into new intersections.
In a few blocks of where I live, traffic planners have recently ordered bad, old style intersections with traffic lights installed at Crowley and Upper Lachine, St. James just east of St. Remi, Old Orchard just north of Upper Lachine, Belgrade and St. James old style corners that require people to wait unnecessarily, usually for no reason whatsoever.
Meanwhile places like posh, upscale, well-loved Nun's Island have installed many roundabouts and still don't have a single traffic light on the entire island.
Yet St. Anne de Bellevue recently proposed to add one a dinosaur-era traffic light to deal with a road issue just a week ago, something the new mayor doesn't seem too thrilled about.
So with evidence of massive incompetence by Quebec's various city traffic planners, it's time to formalize a new system that would require more public input to defend against further bad traffic choices.
one on old