Roundabouts: A different perspective
 

Suppose a fire truck has to go through 6 or more roundabouts to get to your house. That means it has to speed up and slow down 6 or more times from about 5 miles per hour to 35mph? That wastes precious minutes. The same for ambulance and police. It won't affect me but I was just wondering if anyone has ever given any thought to this.

I guess you could say that emergency vehicles have problems with traffic slowing them down all the time. So this is just another obstacle they have to get around?

Without roundabouts those intersections would be four way stop or traffic lights. I think the roundabouts are faster, and safer, to negotiate and i think the engineers that designed our traffic system took this into consideration.

They are fine, traffic moves very quickly the way they are set up.................

PS,Hope that fire truck is going more than 35 mph to my house.

i think the obstacles are the vehicles that DON'T pull to the curb to facilitate the emergency travel of the first responder/fire truck/ambulance!

Just imagine a 4 way stop with traffic backed up in all directions, then imagine folks trying to get over to the right hand lane when they hear the siren. Emergency vehicles don't blast through red lights. They sound their siren, slow down, insure oncoming traffic sees them and has stopped, then they proceed through the intersection. I don't believe the roundabouts slow down emergency vehicles at all.

I am on a fire company in pa. and the biggest problem we have is people not pulling to the side or getting over at least. We are allowed to go faster then speed limits and we also have electronic equipment that change the traffic signals for us to proceed. I dont think the roundabouts slow them up that much. They seem to get to calls with little problem here.

We have defrib devices on our street and while taking instructions in CPR and the use of the devices, we were told that emergency vehicles can get to where assistance is needed, fairly quickly, a matter of minutes. Lights and sirens help alert motorists to get the heck out of the way. Generally people do, but there are a few that either can't see or hear....they can cause problems. If everyone moves out of the way of emergency vehicles, the roundabouts aren't much of a problem. EMT's get where needed, quickly, Mom in law needed them this summer. They were there before I could get over to her house and she lives very close to us...and they had 3 roundabouts to navigate on the way.

The whole premise of a roundabout is that all traffic from 4 directions keeps on moving, and when you're actually IN the roundabout, you have 3 chances to get out of it toward the right if fire trucks come up behind you.

There's nothing worse than being stopped at a light at an intersection of 4-lane streets, and some fire trucks come up behind, or at, the line of stopped cars in the left lanes, and you cannot get over to the right because of the lines of cars. The horn blasts and sirens from the trucks are horrifying and sometimes there is nowhere for you to go to get out of the way!

This is the one exception where you don't have to obey the lights. If the first person in the line pulls into the intersection, it makes room for another car to move over. I have been in this situation 3 times, twice I was at the light and pulled into the intersection to let cars move to the right and let the ambulance have room to pass. The third time, I was farther back in the line and nobody moved. The ambulance lost precious time as we all waited for the light to change.

I love the round abouts......much better than stop signs or stop lights! they work so smoothly, usually. Of course there will be some problems if there are a lot of cars entering or exiting at the same time, but that doesn't happen very often.

roundabouts
 

I read that the Feds pay more of the cost of a roundabout than a controlled intersecton because they reduce the number of serious or fatal accidents.