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Consider what it must be like for a recent immigrant to New Mexico. You look different. You sound different. The way you act seems perfectly reasonable to you, but the people here think you’re weird. Some people find you downright terrifying.
Welcome to the world of a traffic roundabout.
To a traffic roundabout, raised in a world where traffic roundabouts are the norm, it all seems so simple: Approach me at any one of my four arms, travel around me in a counterclockwise direction and exit on another one of my arms whenever you like. I’m round and you go around me. What part of “round” aren’t you understanding?
Oh, dear roundabout, if only it were that easy.
In New Mexico, we like our roads straight and, truth be told, we don’t really cotton to a lot of intersections. Our driving comfort zone is the window down, a beverage between our knees and a good 20 miles before another road comes into view.
When we must have intersections, we take ours straight. An intersection is where Road A crosses Road B and a red sign or a red light suggests who should stop. And, yes, it is only a suggestion.
That is why undies have been in major bunches, meetings have been glutted with grousers, polls have been taken and politicians booed at in the wake of the city of Albuquerque proposing to replace the Candelaria and Rio Grande intersection stoplight with one of those European-raised roundabouts.
Traffic rolls through the recently completed $1.1 million roundabout on Central Ave. at 8th St. and Park Ave. SW. (dean hanson/journal)
Get the pitchforks!
Well, the Rio Grande/Candelaria project is finito and we staved off the furr-in-ers this time, but there will be other opportunities for roundabouts to infiltrate our otherwise homogenous traffic systems.
That is probably why the city invested your tax dollars to make a movie you can stream for free on the city’s website, called “Navigating the Modern Roundabout.” (Spoiler alert: You navigate it by driving around in it.)
All of this blows the roundabout’s mind.
Roundabouts know what they have to offer New Mexico. When you’re driving in a circle, you can’t blow a stop sign or a red light and T-bone anybody. You have to be completely blotto to go the wrong way in a roundabout and hit someone head-on, and if you do, both cars are driving slowly.
That’s why roundabouts reduce overall collisions somewhat, reduce collisions with injuries a lot and nearly eliminate fatal collisions.
If you’re a roundabout, you look at all that research and think, I deserve a block party, not a protest movement.
Roundabouts may think they’re perfect, but they’re not. Here’s some tough love for the new immigrant: You force us to slow down and we like to go fast. You are no fun to drive through hauling a long trailer. You’re kind of expensive. And you could do a better job sprucing up the doughnut hole in your middle.
And, no offense, but you take some getting used to. When the new roundabout was built in north Bernalillo County where Roy Road reaches N.M. 313, tire tracks in the dirt revealed that a driver had proceeded up and over the circle and straight through on his or her merry way.
Speaking of circles, like many recent immigrants, roundabouts hold their own prejudices against an even smaller minority. Go on the pro-roundabout website, roundaboutsusa.com, and take a look at the part that explains how roundabouts differ from traffic circles. Traffic engineering prejudice is an ugly thing.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
-- Email the reporter at lesliel@abqjournal.com. Call the reporter at 505-823-3914
