Traffic circles or round-abouts are fairly common all over the world except for North America. Basically, they allow two or more roads to intersect while conducting traffic in a circle. Rather than having to stop and wait for other cars to pass, in a traffic circle cars merge into a circular road that aggregates and disburses cars as their respective roads come along. As the result, cars do not have to come to a complete stop rather only to slow down to merge into the circular traffic. While traffic circles could be somewhat difficult to navigate especially for novices, they have a number of interesting benefits:
- there is no need for a traffic light, which, on its own, is a significant cost to power an maintain
- traffic does not have to come to a complete stop, thus reducing the probability of traffic jams
- since cars do not have to stop, there is little idling and hence much lower emissions
- even though traffic does not stop, it does slow down causing reduction in dangerous driving
- it is easier to manage intersections of more than two roads since there is no longer any need to determine priority, order and turns
- finally, presence of circles makes otherwise straight roads look more natural and pleasing to the eyes.
The aversion to traffic circles in North America is difficult for us to understand. Even in a such a cosmopolitan city as Toronto we were able to find only two of them - both in the posh neighborhood of Rosedale. And one of them had stop signs on all approaches thus defeating the main advantage of the circle.
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