Posted: 2/24/2008 8:15:35 PM EDT
Well the fuckers are still talking about it  They want to widen SR-14 to 6th Street in Camas.. and then at 15th and 32nd streets they want "traffic circles". In the article in the daily ass wipe they mentioned the widening would help make the flow of traffic faster and safer.. but the round abouts would slow traffic down.. what the fuck? 
|
|
Round abouts increase traffic flow about 40%. They are awesome. Check up on it and see how they work. Completely counter-intuitive, but they work really, really well. For this situation they just need to make the circles bigger, a lot bigger. Clark Griswold: [Reapedly saying it while he can't turn left] Hey look kids, there's Big Ben, and there's Parliament. |
They also make great great places to land the Airlift Northwest birds when the morons that cant figure out how to work in a traffic circle get squished by the semi's. 
|
We have 2 of those damn things up here in my area since suncadia moved in . They are a PITA!!! I remember when I got back into town after working a summer away and I was heading down bullfrog road at about 60mph, they did'nt have any warnings what so ever as they must have just got the damn thing done, I went over the center island of damn thing and I swear I got air born. I had to turn around and see what the hell I hit . Thankfully I own a chevy and nothing broke . Buddy of mine did the same and broke something on his front end, he owned a Ford .
|
|
Man, the invention of cloverleaf-off-ramps instead of stop signs and 90-degree turns on a freeway must have really confused and pissed a lot of people off. How often do you come to an intersection that requires you to stop (with or without a stop-light), there is no traffic coming in any direction, and you either go for it instead of stopping or wanted to do so? Personally, I find myself in this situation almost daily. I also used to live in a town that had very high seasonal traffic both before and after installing a round-about. Everyone bitches and moans about how stupid it is because "that's not the way we do things around here", but I haven't yet seen any instance where changing the intersection layout has slowed things down when traffic is heavy. Sure, there are accidents. They are usually people who are old enough to the point where it's questionable whether or not they should even be driving to begin with. But then, there are accidents with people running stop signs and red lights as well. Some things never change. |
|
The number of accidents in modern roundabouts and the number of accidents at a signal are approximately the same. The difference is in the severity. At roundabouts, most of the accidents are slower speed, side swipe type accidents. Generally doesn't result in injuries. At signals, the accidents tend to be more several rear-enders or t-bone collisions resulting in a higher number of injuries/fatalities. Modern roundabouts are going to be installed more and more in this state. So get used to them. On the other hand, we probably will never see this type of roundabout here. Magic Roundabout |
For those with driving skills beyond alternately slamming the accelerator and brake pedals, roundabouts actually improve traffic flow. Better to continue moving at a constant albeit lesser speed than the stop and go congestion that traffic lights and stop signs create. But hey, it's different, so it must be bad.
|
Bwahahaha!! Been there, seen it!! A BMW sedan tried to cut under a fuel tanker in a two lane traffic circle, just south of West Pt NY, to get onto the Bear Mt Bridge. She got lucky when she bounced off of the left rear set of trailer tires, and was pushed back into the inner lane where she started from. |
|
I thought they were pretty weird at first too, but after watching a TRAINING VIDEO a few times they're easy to get used to. They're cheaper than stoplights and it's easy to see how the severity of accidents get reduced with them. |
It's a state highway with a speed limit of 55 MPH with a high volume of traffic, not a city street. More over when SR-14 was first built, they put down the road bed for 4 lanes of traffic all the way through to East Clark County. There are no homes or businesses in the way, all they need to do is build up the road bed a little and put pavement down and put in the over passes. There is no way that keeping 14 a 2 lane through Washougal is smart in the long term.. the choke point will change from Lady Island in Camas to just past 6th street and will be worse because of the round about. It seems to me more like a band aid than an actual solution to the amount of growth out here. |
Yeah, and a lot other little country 2 lanes just need widening to 4 lanes and overpasses installed, too. Welcome to the club. Now where is all of the $$$ going to come from? Come try driving US2, SR9, SR203, etc, etc, etc and that SR14 will probably seem not quite so bad. |
|
Traffic circles suck ass unless you live in Europe, Oz or NZ. Me and another guy got the plans for a traffic circle here in Oak Harbor shut down after I embarresed the state DOT traffic circle guy and the mayor in the local paper. The traffic circles in NZ work pretty well, but I can't see people in this state learning to merge with traffic moving 45 mph in a traffic circle, let alone move to the inside lane if they are not going to make the first right out of the traffic circle. C'mon, we have fucktards in this state who can't accelerate to the flow of freeway traffic from a quarter mile long freeway onramp, and God forbid that they know the difference between merge and yield.
|
|
We have one in particular that I really have to ask WHY? The state had the option to put a light in on hwy 203 (Carnation Duvall rd) which would have cost $2.5 million. Instead they put in a Circle that cost $3.88 million. So the state spent an additional $1.33 million. I called and asked the obvious question and all the guy on the phone could say is that we would be saving $7,000 a year |
|
They were smart enough to put this stupid f***ing roundabout on the offramp in North Bend. As you all know, roundabouts don't go at the bottom of offramps, but since the people that make these decisions usually have absolutely no idea how traffic or roads work... We have a roundabout at the end of our offramp. I seriously think that they only put it there so they could put some pretty plants in the middle of it and look more artsy. I miss our town being "redneck". Now it's an "art community". Go**amn Microsoft people and their liberal high-priced planned communities. Normal people can't even afford to live there and all of us poor folks had to move. Anyway, to really drive the nail home and put to bed any doubts that a team of drunken monkeys planned this roundabout, guess what they planted in the middle of it? 3 little baby pine trees. F***ing idiots. |
|
After driving in the UK for a few weeks, the massive grid of stop-lighted intersections in the US seems completely retarded. If the round-abouts have 2 or more lanes and people know which one to use and know that turn signals are the missing link with US drivers... they would work here. [inventor of the US traffic system] I know!... lets have people stop and occasionally go while other drivers blow thru that same space at 50mph... what's the worst that could happen? [/inventor of the US traffic system] |
Don't forget about the motorcycles and scooters. People in the USA will have to operate them like they do in the UK. Lane splitting and running to the front of stop signs and stop lights, plus knee dragging fun in the roundabouts! |
[conspiracy theory] By putting that circle there, a gun shop was taken off the face of the earth...they needed no better reason than that. 
|
|
At my school they just finished revamping the parking lot, and we now have a big ol' round-about in the front parking lot. (The thing has 4 crosswalks that don't seem to have any good use because anyone with half a brain isn't going to get in the way of a bunch of community college students in a round-about.... So maybe there's an argument for the intelligence factor??) It seems a bit strange to me that a round about would be placed in a parking lot, though. Does it actually help? For all the time I've been there, the parking lot was under construction, so I don't know what it was like before. |
|
Roundabouts are great, unless they do something incredibly stupid like putting stop signs or lights on the things. Totally defeating their purpose. Yeah, they slow down traffic right? Sure, compared two what, stopping at 4 way where the nearest car is a mile down the road? In heavy traffic, it's not much difference than the stop and go of stop signs, better actually. The only issue I can really see is the complete lack of W. WA drivers to understand the concept of yielding and merging. |
Traffic circles in New Jersey For the most part, they were a Mongolian clusterfuck of Biblical proportion that were beginning to be phased out in the mid to late 1980s. Only a handful survive. This state is where you do 80 in a 65 just to avoid being run off the road. Circles will not fly in Washington. One of the last remaining circles in NJ, the Allaire Circle on Route 34 in Wall, NJ. 
|