The first time I ever experienced travelling through a roundabout was in November of 2000. I was in London, being driven by a fellow Canadian who temporarily "forgot" how to both drive on the left side of the road, and how to negotiate a roundabout. All I remember, really, is screaming and seeing a large lorry barrelling towards us, honking its horn.
Thanks to fate and some quickly-recalled driving skills, we made it through without a scratch, but the experience soured me on the idea of roundabouts.
It never occurred to me that, over a decade after that first encounter, I might have to negotiate a roundabout here in Humboldt.
Yes, you read it correctly. City council is currently investigating installing a roundabout at the junction of Hwy. 5 and 20.
I, for one, cannot possibly see how that will work, for a number of reasons.
First, no one in Saskatchewan knows the rules of a roundabout. Other than maybe one still in existence in Saskatoon, I don't think there are any here. We are therefore not taught in driver's ed how to negotiated one, and it's certainly not on our driver's tests. Even if it was, drivers here seem to have trouble remembering far more common rules of the road, such as who goes first at a stop sign, or how to use a four-way stop. We would never be able to remember who has the right-of-way inside a roundabout.
The result, I am sure, would be collision after collision, with no one really knowing who was actually at fault in each one. Bodyshops in the area would be even busier than they are right now, as would insurance offices and adjusters, and let's not forget our local RCMP. It might just jump our crime stats up so much, we'll require a dedicated member, just to police the one intersection.
Second, the space just isn't big enough for a proper roundabout. I've travelled through tiny ones in London, and far larger ones in Paris. The difference was that, in London, the vehicles were far smaller. Our tour bus was the largest thing on the road, and it was smaller than those here. There were no Super Bs trying to get through those intersections - they would never have made it, even though London truck drivers are surely among the craftiest and bravest in the world.
The fact is, we have huge semis travelling through our city on a very regular basis. They use that intersection. From what I can see, they won't fit through a roundabout unless we take out more of Civic Park and the Courthouse lot and make it far larger.
To deal with the truck problem, the city is actually investigating putting in lights for truck traffic, while cars and other smaller vehicles would use the roundabout. What a recipe for disaster that is. Where will the trucks wait for the lights that won't block the cars? And if the cars are not controlled by lights, how will they know to stop for a semi barrelling toward them?
This just doesn't make any sense at all.
And what about pedestrians? Am I the only one who remembers, about 10 years ago, a failed experiment with a four-way stop at the intersection of Main St. and 6th Ave.? It failed, not only because drivers had trouble making sense of it, but because no one, ever, let pedestrians cross. There were no signals to let them know when it was safe, and it actually never was, because drivers were so distracted trying to remember who has the right to go first (it's the driver who stops first, or in the case of a tie, the one on the right, by the way), that they never paid any attention to those of us on foot. Unless you took your life into your hands and strode out into the intersection, claiming your right of way, you could sit on a corner forever and never be given a safe signal to go. Multiply that issue times 10, and that's what the situation will be like with a roundabout.
I'm all for new and inventive ideas at city hall, but those ideas, at the end of the day, should be about making our community better.
A roundabout in downtown Humboldt will only make the driving situation here infinitely worse.
