In a 180-degree turn from the norm, an overwhelming majority of residents who will be affected by planned intersection improvements at Standifer Gap and Ooltewah-Ringgold roads favor a roundabout over a red light.
"There was almost unanimous support for the project and about 90 percent preferred a roundabout," Hamilton County engineer Todd Leamon said following a community preliminary information and discussion meeting.
Plans will soon be filed with Tennessee Department of Transportation, which is overseeing the 80 percent federal grant money being used for the project. From that point, Leamon said the process should move quickly, with a tentative construction time of next summer.
"We're hoping with this amount of communication with us and the property owners beforehand ... hopefully we'll move through that process pretty quickly," he said in regards to right of way acquisition, which can sometimes hold projects up for years.
Construction is expected to take around four months, according to Leamon. While there will be congestion and delays as one side is finished and then the other, he said traffic will still be allowed to pass through the construction site, albeit at reduced speeds.
"A roundabout does take a little bit more work [than a traffic signal]," he said. "With a roundabout, all four legs of the intersection will be impacted, where only two would be necessarily as impacted with a signal."
Leamon said that although some of the first meeting's 25 attendees raised the option of a four-way stop, it is not feasible.
"It may improve safety a little bit but it does not improve capacity," he said. "The capacity of that area drops dramatically if we do that, so we moved on past that."