I’m cautiously optimistic that building traffic roundabouts in the Charlotte area will turn out for the good, albeit with a learning curve. Judging from how often yield signs and needless u-turns confuse and snarl local traffic, I figure roundabouts will start functioning properly around 2018.
And I also note a trend among government road designing and building types in North Carolina to try to use roundabouts as an excuse to “down lane” streets from two to one lane. One traffic engineer-type in Raleigh recently explicitly said that you “had to” cut lanes down to one in each direction for roundabouts. This is not true. Two-lane roundabouts abound all over America.
In sum, be on the look out for more anti-car road building schemes cloaked in various guises.
