I think that more than a few of us have heard this claim. We don’t believe it, so we had someone out with a camera to check. Here are five photos from just one roundabout. You can see from these pictures that signs have been run over, curbs have been run over, and in the last picture, part of a signpost is sticking out of the ground where it can do tire damage. Each of these signs costs about $500 to replace, not to mention the cost of repairs to the vehicles that hit them.
Have you had an accident, or witnessed an accident, at a roundabout? Let us know. It seems as if our public engineers would have us believe that they are safer, yet they have no records which we have seen to verify this.
Interestingly enough, the engineering consulting firm working with the city on these roundabouts is Short Elliott Hendrickson (SEH). Our current city engineer, Julie Kennedy, is a former SEH employee, as is Tom Pagel, our former engineer and current city administrator. Suspicious?





Remember, feel free to contact us if you have further information on this subject.

Post script.

I just found a good article about a city engineer who is more concerned with safety than with allowing his city to go ahead with an inappropriate roundabout. He feels as if simple signals would be much safer in that location.

I guess he’s not following in lockstep behind a previous employer.