Roundabouts Got Us Wound Up in Illinois

It’s on. It’s off. The county is in. The county is out. Round and round we go with the roundabout at 48^th and State in Quincy.

Increasingly across the country roundabouts are being employed by municipalities to alleviate traffic clog points and backups. The premise is logical but the trepidation of commuters is also understandable.

Get our free mobile app

How many seasoned drivers were taught to navigate through a roundabout? In the tr-state area that number is tiny. Only those who grew up near such things and then moved here can say yes. Could you have learned after moving away before coming back, sure. Those percentages are still small.

It’s that unfamiliarity with the concept and the lack of applied knowledge that has local drivers worried. I think it was Dan Aykroyd in “Spies Like us” who said – “We mock what we don’t understand.” But it was his co-star in that movie -Chevy Chase who imprinted on Gen-X (and maybe Boomers too) the troubles with roundabouts in “National Lampoon’s European Vacation” when, as Clark Griswold he got into a roundabout on the bank of the Thames in view of “Look kids! Big Ben and Parliament” and couldn’t get left for hours. Is the intersection at 48^th and State as busy as one in the heart of London England? –No. So you won’t get caught in it for hours.

The other complaint regarding the building of the roundabout is the allocation of money. Could the city use the money in other areas to shore up street deficiencies? This is a more logical argument. Many see the implementation of the roundabout as something to try when you have a surplus of money for roads.

The irony of the roundabout idea is that it’s meant to shrink travel time and mitigate traffic at that intersection, but the application of the roundabout will (as I’ve been told) cause drivers to avoid 48^th and State completely. Problem solved?

There are roundabouts that have been in use in Illinois and Missouri for decades. Do they work as designed? Most of the time. There are at times backups at the roundabouts that are peppered around Forest Park and the St. Louis Zoo. That could be a good place to practice. Next time you are in St. Louis, get to Forest Park and drive around and get more comfortable with the roundabouts. This, hypothetically should help with worries and concerns at least about navigating these unexpected speed bumps.