Destin ready for another roundabout

DESTIN - Despite predictions to the contrary, Destin residents can learn to drive around traffic circles safely.
   
In 2003, after the area's first traffic roundabout went in by Home Depot, just outside city limits, some residents told The Log that while roundabouts might work well elsewhere, Destinites would find them so confusing, they were collisions waiting to happen.
   
"I can find one (traffic circle) accident within the last year, and it happened within the roundabout in front of Home Depot," Captain Greg Gaddis of the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office told The Log last month. "That is it."
   
On Dec. 1, Destin will hold a 4:30 groundbreaking for the Commons Boulevard extension that will run from Two Trees Road to Airport Road. The Commons/Two Trees intersection will include Destin's third traffic circle, following the Home Depot and Benning Drive/Mountain Drive roundabouts built several years ago.
   
The Benning/Mountain Circle, the first installed within city limits, was built because the two sides of Mountain do not align at the intersection, forcing drivers to zig-zag. In 2002, incapacitated eastbound drivers twice crashed into a store on the west side of the intersection.
   
In 2003, then-Transportation Manager Jo Laurie Penrose reported that buying land to realign Mountain would cost $296,000, but a roundabout would cost only $182,000. Then-City Engineer Chuck Meister said a fourway stop would be cheaper, but would slow down traffic too much, and the road would still need realigning.
   
The council voted for the traffic circle.
   
When the city decided to widen and improve the Main Street/Airport/Legion intersection, Meister recommended a traffic circle there, too. A city consultant said that would cost $170,000 less than a traffic signal, even though it required the city to buy more land at the intersection.
   
That roundabout didn't fly. Councilor Larry Williges, a Kell-Aire Gardens resident, said that without red lights creating periodic breaks in the traffic flow, it would be too difficult to get out of the subdivision; Fire Chief Tuffy Dixon said the roundabout might be an obstacle for fire trucks heading west; one of the businesses at the intersection said it would lose too much parking; and Councilor Dewey Destin said he thought the savings were exaggerated.
   
Despite local pessimism about traffic circles, studies indicate they are safer than signalized intersections: Traffic slows down; there's no rush to beat red lights; and all turns in and out are right turns, reducing the points at which collisions happen. In his book "Traffic," author Tom Vanderbilt said that a roundabout has 16 points where a car could potentially hit another vehicle or a pedestrian, whereas a four-way intersection has 56 points.
   
Consumers Research magazine reported in 2000 that once drivers adjust to a roundabout, crashes drop 39 percent, injury-producing crashes drop 76 percent and there's a 90 percent drop in fatalities. The article estimates roundabouts can also save up to $5,000 a year in maintenance and electricity compared to stop-lights.
   
The Florida Department of Transportation says roundabouts do have some drawbacks: Timing can't be adjusted for peak periods, and if there's a bottleneck nearby, traffic can back up into the roundabout.
   
Installing a roundabout at Two Trees/Commons has been talked about for five years. When Commons is extended to where the Indian Bayou Trail/Airport intersection is now, Indian Bayou Trail will close its west end, leaving Two Trees the only exit from the Indian Bayou subdivision.
   
Indian Bayou Homeowners Association President Larry Szczur said this year that a roundabout will make it easier to leave the subdivision during heavy summer traffic than if the intersection had a stop sign.