The city of Sarasota is planning two new roundabouts for Main Street – at Five Points and Orange Avenue -- smack in the middle of the course of the city’s traditional downtown parade route.
But planners and city engineers say the new roundabouts can be designed with "mountable lips" and truck and bus aprons around their perimeters so floats and tractor-trailers can run up on them. However, marching bands will have to plan either on going around on one side or splitting in the middle when they reach the roundabouts, said City Engineer Alex DavisShaw (cq).
Both roundabouts may have public artwork in their centers, said the city’s public art planner, Clifford Smith. Downtown merchants will help plan and pay for whatever aesthetic upgrades are made to the Five Points roundabout, and the developer of a new $20-million, 180-foot-tall, hotel-retail-office complex at Orange and Main, Benderson Development Co., will pay for that roundabout’s costs above what the city would have to pay to install new signals at the intersection – which are needed now – as well as the cost of a new sculpture to comply with its public artwork commitment.
In addition to aesthetic considerations, the commissioned artwork will have to be designed with sight lines and dimensional guidelines to accommodate traffic safely, Smith said. "And it must not be something people will feel compelled to approach to see it up close; it has to be something best appreciated from 20, 30 feet away."
For a number of reasons, the city is moving toward installing a lot of roundabouts to replace intersections with traffic signals, DavisShaw said, but it is going to proceed slowly with the changeover "so the public can begin to feel comfortable and familiar with them," with the hope that people will be more accepting of something new at numerous intersections around town.
She said the new roundabout at Hillview Street and Laurent Place has been well accepted by those who frequent that Southside Village area, although truck drivers complain that it causes some headaches for them. "With our efforts to make the city more pedestrian-friendly, there are going to be some complaints [from truckers], not just about roundabouts but at tight right-angle intersections, too," she said.
The new roundabout at Orange Avenue comes at the request of Benderson, DavisShaw said, presumably for aesthetic reasons and because it will better accommodate pedestrians, especially the hotel guests and tenants’ clients and customers.
Along with their offer of better pedestrian safety -- vehicles must slow to safely enter and navigate a roundabout -- DavisShaw noted that these traffic handlers are becoming more and more sought after in the United States as Americans grow accustomed to them, for many reasons. Among them:
• Pollution. Cars no longer sit and idle at intersections, which is especially annoying at off-peak hours when there is no reason to stop and wait for a green light. Therefore, fuel is not wasted and carbon monoxide and other polluting emissions are reduced.
• Vehicular safety. The total number of crashes is minimized by roundabouts and those that do occur tend to be fender-benders at reduced speeds. Even more serious collisions are at right-angles, by the very nature of the circulation through the roundabout, which are far less serious than head-on crashes.
• Storm safety and hurricane evacuations. When power is out, roundabouts continue to control the flow of traffic without electricity.
• Efficiency. While they do slow traffic flow, roundabouts don’t stop it abruptly – at nearly every block in some areas – but let it continue to flow smoothly
• Enhanced aesthetics. Plantings, sculptures, small fountains or decorative pavers and the like can enhance visual interest.
"People had a lot of anxiety about the new, fixed [Ringling Causeway] bridge. They thought no one would ever walk across it because it would be too tall, but all those fears have proven groundless. The bridge is pretty well universally loved now," DavisShaw said.
"When they become familiar with the roundabouts," she said, "they will come to like them, too."