City traffic engineer John Van Winkle stood in the center of a new traffic circle in Stuart Heights and adjusted some signs when a red BMW entered the one-way circle at about 45 mph in the wrong direction.
The driver sped recklessly down a hill on the left side of a two-way residential street. Just five minutes later, a school bus with students onboard rumbled up the same hill.
Shaking his head in disbelief, Mr. Van Winkle said irresponsible drivers like the one in the BMW are why neighborhood residents requested a traffic circle at the intersection of Haywood Avenue, Ozark Circle and Ozark Place.
"That's the kind of crazy drivers we see on this street," homeowner William Bolton said. "If he had hit the school bus, there would have been serious injuries."
Chattanooga's Neighborhood Traffic Management Program helps residents deal with speeding in their neighborhoods through such options as speed humps and traffic circles.
Speed humps are in such heavy demand that, at the beginning of last year, 50 city streets had them with 25 scheduled for installation through 2011, the city's Web site noted.
Additional traffic circles are on Old Mission Road in Brainerd and in the Valleybrook subdivision in Hixson, Mr. Van Winkle said.
Neighborhood homeowner Jens Christensen spearheaded the community's effort to get a traffic circle installed last month at the Stuart heights intersection.
"Haywood Avenue seems to be a convenient through-way for a number of folks traveling from Lupton Drive to Hixson Pike," said Mr. Christensen, the director of marketing at Chattanooga Community Kitchen whose home borders the intersection.
Not only do many drivers fail to yield at the intersection, some have been seen purposefully spinning around "doing donuts," creating an unsafe environment for pedestrians and car traffic alike, Mr. Christensen said.
"The traffic circle offers a simple solution to reducing speed and creating a safer intersection without the introduction of speed bumps," he said.
Mr. Van Winkle said traffic circles are used to "calm" neighborhood traffic, while larger roundabouts help lessen heavy traffic on larger roads.
The designs improve traffic flow and reduce accident rates, he said. And by keeping cars moving instead of sitting at traffic lights, they're better for the environment, too.
"I'm the Pied Piper of roundabouts," he said. "There are places for roundabouts and traffic circles, and we should take advantage of them."
Feature writer Karen Nazor Hill covers fashion, design, home and gardening, pets, entertainment, human interest features and more. She also is an occasional news reporter and the Town Talk columnist. She previously worked for the Catholic newspaper Tennessee Register and was a reporter at the Chattanooga Free Press from 1985 to 1999, when the newspaper merged with the Chattanooga Times. She won a Society of Professional Journalists Golden Press third-place award in feature writing for ...
Roundabouts may serve as somewhat of a deterrent to aggressive drivers, but they are a pain in the rear end to those of us who drive responsibly. I'd love to see them outlawed. The one at the bottom of the W Road is a real lemon.
I wish the "Pied Piper" would lead his rats somewhere else.
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