Oromocto knows its O's and says they're safe
Published Wednesday September 8th, 2010
A5
By HEATHER MCLAUGHLIN
mclaughlin.heather@dailygleaner.com
If Fredericton drivers want reassurance that roundabouts are the way to go, Mayor Fay Tidd and Oromocto town administration are the go-to experts.
Oromocto has four roundabouts and Tidd said they are as safe as safe can be.
"They're a great idea," she said. "I really feel that they are very safe."
Fredericton's public works and engineering department is gearing up to install the city's first roundabout. The only other place in the city where there's one is on the University of New Brunswick and St. Thomas University campuses near the Wu Conference Centre.
Construction work has begun on Brookside Drive to improve the road before the roundabout is installed near the Reynolds Street intersection across from West Hills housing development.
Wayne Carnell, chief administrative officer and town clerk, said Oromocto owes its roundabouts to the designs of McGill University architecture Prof. Harold Spence-Sales.
During the 1950s, when Oromocto was a community of 300 people, Spence-Sales was commissioned to plan the design of military housing for Canadian Forces Base Gagetown.
Gagetown was constructed during the mid-'50s and was officially opened in 1958.
"Springing from the earth in a matter of three or four years was another 1,200 residences," Carnell said. "And beyond that eventually."
Today, the base employs 4,000 military personnel and 700 civilians.
"As part of his design, he chose the use of roundabouts and we've sort of kept that in mind as we go forward. They're widely accepted in Europe, of course, and now Charlottetown is coming on board as well," Carnell said.
"You need a little bit more space for them and in a congested area, they're not all that feasible," he said. "But they're just great."
While Carnell doesn't have numbers to back him up, the town is convinced the roundabouts improve safety by a good measure.
T-bone accidents, when the front of one car hits the side of another, tend to cause more serious injuries. They occur more frequently at four-way intersections.
"At best, you'd have a glancing blow," Carnell said of the possibilities of sideswiping a driver already in the circle.
In a traffic circle, a driver has to yield to vehicles in the roundabout before entering and looping around in a counterclockwise fashion.
"You don't enter it until you have a break in the traffic to enter it. The people inside go around until they have an exit point and then they exit," Carnell said.
The first two traffic circles built in Oromocto were the ones in the downtown business district and one near the military quarters at St. Lawrence and Miramichi streets.
"The town more recently has placed two of them: one on the old Trans-Canada, which is now Restigouche North at Miramichi, and similarly at the Gateway Miramichi intersection," Carnell. "It's got off-set roads even and it seems to function without any difficulties."
Although the provincial government required a bit of persuasion to permit the traffic circle on the old Trans-Canada Highway, it relented and seems content with the results.
"We'd have one on every corner if I had my way," Carnell said. "We've had very few, if any, accidents at the new one over a five- or six-year period."
Carnell said the roundabouts are environmentally friendly. Motorists aren't stacked up behind a traffic signal light, burning extra fuel and releasing more pollutants into the atmosphere.
Tidd said she can count the number of mishaps involving the town's traffic circles in single digits.
"I haven't even heard of people getting rear-ended," Tidd said. "I only know of one thing that happened and that was someone who wasn't doing their best to drive with due diligence and went up onto the edge of one of the circles.
"They certainly speed traffic up because nobody is waiting at all ... Over the years, people have made fun of us with our four O's - our four traffic circles - but I'd like to see a fifth one. I'm all for them."
Prev
Linear Mode
