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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Ep. 45: Carmel, Indiana - Roundabout Revolution
Known as the roundabout capital of the United States, Carmel has redefined road safety and efficiency with over 150 roundabouts, heralding a new era of urban design. Join us as we explore how Carmel's commitment to roundabouts has led to remarkable safety improvements and significant economic savings. We'll also highlight Carmel's impressive biking infrastructure and its status as a top cycling city.
Doors are closing. Public transit, that's my way to roll On the metro. I'm taking control. Bus stops, train tracks it's my daily grind. Transit, it's the rhythm of my life. On this episode of Transit Tangents, we discuss one small American city that has replaced over 150 standard intersections with roundabouts. What were the effects on traffic safety, as well as the number of folks biking and walking? Find out on this episode of Transit Tangents. Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are going to be talking about a topic that pops up in my TikTok Instagram feed quite a bit. It mixed in between some fun Cities by Diana videos, some fun bike infrastructure videos. I run into all sorts of fun traffic looking videos. A lot of them are from our friend Noah over at Streetcraft.
Speaker 1:We did an interview with way back at this point and it's about roundabouts, and I oftentimes will see Noah highlighting one intersection or another that looks really complicated and almost 100% of the time the solution is building some sort of roundabout. And we found an interesting place when doing some research about roundabouts that I think you all will find some interest in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you haven't already guessed what that place is, based on the description that Lewis gave, or it maybe popping up in your TikTok feeds, we are talking about what must be the busiest city in the US. So, without further ado, round and round and round we go. Where do we stop?
Speaker 1:Carmel, indiana knows. Can't believe we got through that. Yeah, so we're going to be discussing carmel, indiana and the. This is probably like a couple months ago at this point we added this to our list of episode ideas. I'd seen a few videos, uh, by the youtube channel road guy rob. Uh, he does a lot of really fun content. We'll put links in the description to the videos that we'll kind of talk a little bit about in here, but he does a lot of good content in general. And yeah, he just talked about how this one city in Indiana had replaced over 150 intersections with roundabouts and they're not stopping there. It's literally. If you look at Google Maps, you will just see roundabout after roundabout, after roundabout after roundabout.
Speaker 2:It's really fun to follow a street and just see every single one of them. And in some places you'll see a busier area and you'll have a triangle of streets and there'll be one of each triangle. So there's this amazing constellation of roundabouts on the map.
Speaker 1:So on this episode we're going to get into why Carmel is building so many roundabouts, why roundabouts are good, why roundabouts are bad. There's some cost-benefit analysis stuff with roundaboutsabouts, and we're just going to really dive into it and use caramel as a bit of a case study here. So we'll start off, though, by talking a bit about the safety effects here. So the first one is, you know, compared to a regular signalized intersection, where, if you have a green light, you can just stay at your speed and kind of keep going through it, some cases, going pretty fast, a roundabout is going to force you to just slow down as you approach it, which obviously leads to a lot of safety benefits just from the fact that you're going slower.
Speaker 2:But Lewis, Americans can't use roundabouts. There's no way. It's impossible. I've heard that argument so many times. Every time I hear that a DOT is going to build a roundabout, someone's like, oh, it's going to be terrible, Americans will never learn how to use it.
Speaker 1:Yes, driving the wrong way through and all sorts of stuff and frankly I mean that definitely does happen in some places. My guess is that folks in Carmel have figured it out at this point.
Speaker 1:Hope so or else we wouldn't see the safety statistics frankly that they have there, frankly, uh, that that they have there, so, um, yeah, so I mean. So the speed's coming down major, major factor to it. The other thing is is if you can think about the potential accidents that would happen at a regular four-way signalized intersection. They're going to be pretty like head-on in nature and be like kind of brutal. So you know, that's either like literally a head-on collision, front of the car to the front of the car. Uh, you have a lot of t-bone crashes where someone might be running a red light and crashing into a car going the other way. Those are like kind of the worst sorts of accidents. Where is when you're in a roundabout again, you're moving slower and things are kind of happening at an angle and you just generally get less dangerous accidents, less injuries in those sorts of accidents.
Speaker 2:So how did Carmel, louisiana become the Carmel Indiana? What'd I say? Louisiana, louisiana, wow, okay. So how did Carmel Indiana become the self-proclaimed roundabout capital of the United States? It's kind of a funny story. But before we get into sort of the decision that pushed the town in this way, first we found an interesting little fact about Carmel and sort of the decision that pushed the town in this way. First we found an interesting little fact about Carmel, and that is the fact that it was one of the first cities in the United States to get an automated traffic signal Right, and this was in the 1920s, so obviously that was not the norm.
Speaker 1:And yeah, the downtown Carmel. They had their first little stoplight, which is kind of a fun fact about this. And now here we are, a hundred years later, and they're slowly ripping out well, and I like to think I think 1925 they got the light.
Speaker 2:Uh, they were sort of on this. Uh cutting edge of traffic technology. Maybe we should pay attention to carmel, indiana and roundabouts are the. They're not the cutting edge of the round, but the the blunt edge of uh new traffic technology.
Speaker 1:I I think that's a good idea and it's kind of interesting when you look at why they're doing this in the first place, and it's kind of a really basic thing. The mayor of Carmel was on a trip in Europe and was admiring how lovely so many of their pedestrianized spaces were, that it wasn't dangerous to be walking up the side of a road and that pedestrians weren't essentially like a second-class citizen on main thoroughfares throughout the cities, and wanted to see if he could take some of that home to Carmel. And has, and and now, at this point, carmel, uh, is one of the safest places to drive, but also one of the safest places to be a biker or a pedestrian, um in in the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's amazing, it's, it's it uh, supports the argument that every american should go to europe and bring back some of that, those thoughts, totally. I always say everybody should go to europe and then experience the trains, then maybe one day we'll have trains in the us and that's what.
Speaker 1:That's what's happening with roundabouts here and, uh, it's pretty wild. So, like I already highlighted, some of the safety benefits, but when you kind of dive deeper and look at the case study of this happening in Carmel back in the 1990s, before there were roundabouts in Carmel, this was all. The intersections were just like any kind of small city or suburban area that you might find across the United States. The city at the time also had a population of 30,000 people and they saw 215 crashes per year. So 30,000 people, 215 crashes per year. So 30 000 people, 215 crashes per year. Fast forward to 2019, when the city had, at that point, over 120 roundabouts now over 150. Um, the city had a population of a hundred thousand people, so the population of more than three x. However, the amount of car act, car crashes went down. Yeah, it's so. There are now less than 200 crashes in 2019 and With three times the population, very likely three times the amount of cars on the road and crashes have actually gone down and in big response due to the roundabouts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really impressive. And it's even more impressive when we think about this is not a huge city, this is very much a suburb of Indianapolis, so for them to make this investment and see the safety improvements really remarkable thing we're going to jump right back into this episode in just a second, but first, if you have not liked this video or subscribed, please consider doing so.
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Speaker 2:So, in addition to fewer crashes in Carmel, Indiana, what we're also seeing is at a roundabout. The severity of those crashes has also been reduced. So what we see is a 40% reduction in injury crashes at these roundabouts. And then when you look at the teardrop roundabouts, which are a lot of the big highway intersections, that reduction is up to 84%.
Speaker 1:Which absolutely wild, uh, and and we haven't talked about these kind of teardrop roundabouts yet at highway interchanges. So, uh and this I credit to to the youtube channel, road guy rob again we'll put a link here uh, really fascinating kind of story. He had interviews with politicians in carmel and everything. Highly recommend you checking it out after this. But, um, there was uh, essentially a highway that ran, uh, alongside carmel. Um, it was a highway though that didn't even have exits or anything on it yet, it just had stoplights, 55 mile an hour speed limits really dangerous road. Yeah, the city of carmel was growing, more people were using it. You get some bad accidents and obviously you want to try to avoid those.
Speaker 1:City of carmel essentially took over this roadway and turned it more into a traditional highway, but instead of making more traditional on ramps and off ramps that have stoplights at the end they continued on their theme of roundabouts and the design that they landed on was these teardrop roundabouts. Essentially that, uh, think of it almost, if you're listening, like a figure eight kind of vibe, except you're not crossing over. In the middle of the figure eight. You've got two kind of small circles, um, and then a little connector in the middle and uh, they chose the shape for a couple reasons, because obviously you could just put a big roundabout there, and in some countries around the world you do see intersections that just have a big roundabout over or under a highway. However, with that, you're generally needing to build two bridges to be able to make a lot.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of more space in that that area as well, yeah, exactly, takes up more space and, you know, kind of double the cost on the bridges. This tiered up shape makes it so that you can just build one bridge and cross the span while still having all of the safety benefits and more than just the regular traditional roundabouts. Which was pretty amazing because, just from anecdotally you know, crossing some of those intersections on a bike, you know, I think about, like riding across I-35 or other highways here in Austin, those are, you know, even just at the intersections, those are some of the scariest places to be a pedestrian or on a bike, for sure, like by far. So really great to see those sort of statistics and just to have that as a case study when other cities around the country are thinking about what to do with their highway interchanges.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. Also, in addition to safety improvements, the addition of these roundabouts also came with the cost savings for the city. Now it's obviously a big upfront investment to build all these out and then you're going to see some additional cost savings. But what actually ends up happening is when you build the roundabouts it's less than building a signalized intersection. You don't have to have all the sensors and the lights and everything else that kind of goes with those intersections.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and according to the city of Carmel, they're spending $250 thousand dollars less to build a roundabout than to build a signalized intersection. Um, and then in addition to that they actually save, and this adds up they save five thousand dollars in electricity costs per roundabout. Yeah, that's. We'll link the the information here to that. But over time that that adds up quite a bit. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2:It's like, um, I don't think people realize how much energy goes into intersections and the amount of technology that is present at an intersection.
Speaker 1:You probably have some insight into that. Some of it, yeah.
Speaker 2:We should actually do an episode on it one day. But I mean, you have the lights, you have either cameras or some type of other signaling antenna or apparatus or whatever that's attached to the system. Whatever that's attached to the system, it could be treadles that are laid into the concrete, like I said, it can be cameras. In addition to all of this physical infrastructure that has to be on the poles and in the street, all of it also has to collect data at one point. So there's usually a little server somewhere nearby or a storage device somewhere nearby where all this information is being fed. It's a lot of energy consumption and a lot more technology than people think.
Speaker 1:Totally, and I would say, too, that that technology also needs, to be like, extremely durable.
Speaker 1:Like it has to be able to withstand the elements, it has to be outside in the heat, in the cold, all of this stuff. So it becomes that much more expensive, probably because it needs to be very rugged. But then you add into that I mean all that technology does need maintenance, it breaks and it requires specialized technicians who are well-versed in how to use these things to come out and go to these things. So in addition to just like the cost of the electricity and the building, the intersection itself, I mean the maintenance costs over time, really add up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it makes me think of. Everybody's had the experience of pulling up to an intersection and the lights are down and whether they're just both flashing yellow or there's just no light at all, and it's always so chaotic at the intersection trying to figure out, okay, who goes. Now this kind of thing introduces more crashes, but at a roundabout, no matter what the weather conditions are, you're generally going to be fine. It's like you can't get stuck on an escalator, you can't get stuck at a roundabout, you're just going to keep going around Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And you're talking about the weather mountain absolutely. And to you're talking about the weather to that point. Initially, to me, when I was kind of coming up with some of the like pros and cons, one of my cons was going to be potentially snow removal. However, according to the city of Carmel I mean, indiana sees its fair share of snow also. Growing up in upstate New York and living in New Hampshire and Vermont, the towns that I lived in had roundabouts and they're actually supposedly more efficient to snowplow. If you think about the amount of area you have to snowplow with a big intersection, you might end up with weird piles of snow. You might have to do a couple passes through it, whereas in a roundabout you've got kind of one or two loops around which you can just do simultaneously, and now all of a sudden the roundabout is clear of snow. So you also end up with some efficiencies there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and on the note of efficiencies, generally, traffic is just going to move more efficiently through roundabouts. Instead of making all the traffic stop and wait for a light, people can kind of continually move around the circle, which really helps standardize this sort of random pattern of traffic that you're going to see throughout the city. And that is exactly what Carmel, indiana, saw. They have a pretty large grid network that's sort of overlaid on top of smaller suburban neighborhoods, but the traffic moving within this grid is now way more efficient with all the roundabouts, yeah you really get network effects of like, if you have just one roundabout and it's kind of surrounded by stoplights, you're not going to notice major traffic shifts.
Speaker 1:And again, credit to Road Guy Rob here. I didn't even know this term, he uses the term platoons. So if you can imagine sitting at a stoplight, especially at a busy intersection, you might be sitting there for literally a couple minutes. While you're sitting there you're kind of building up this whole group of cars all around you and then when the light turns green, you now have this wave of cars all moving very quickly down the road and kind of in a group and it feels very busy and chaotic and crowded. If you're a biker or pedestrian on the side of the road it'll probably feel pretty intense when this big group goes by.
Speaker 1:But when you kind of over time make each intersection a roundabout, a roundabout, a roundabout, a roundabout, as cars pull up, yeah you're not going to have to stop. You'll kind of slowly be weaving in and out, like you're saying, more randomized, and that's how you end up with these network effects of you're using the space on the road that's there more efficiently because everyone is spread out over it in different places, versus needing to have your roads built out very wide because you have these big groups or platoons, as Rob says in the video of cars all coming through at the same time where you need the road to be wider and fulfill more lanes and all this sort of stuff which leads to worse safety outcomes and and yeah, it's not, it's not good, it's a really interesting thing. I I again I highly encourage you to check out the video that he put together on it.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, but uh, yeah, absolutely um, and one of the things I like about this episode and talking about these roundabouts is that we can sort of lean on previous episodes that we've done, topics that we've talked about. So right now, you know, we're talking about safer streets for cars and pedestrians, we're talking about better bicycling infrastructure, but also what?
Speaker 2:also something that Carmel has focused on I was trying to say carousel in Carmel at the same time, but what Carmel has really focused on has been street dieting as well, or road dieting, and so if you don't know what a road diet is, you can go back and look at that episode. But essentially, a road diet is when you take a street, that is, you know three or four lanes and you shrink the number of lanes, so it's a four lane road. Maybe now it's a two lane road. If it was, you know two lanes or three lanes, or it's with a turning lane in the middle. But either way, you are reducing the number of lanes on the road and then you have all this space to add extra things, as Carmel, indiana has added these roundabouts all over the city. They've actively done this Throughout the city. They've dieted the roads, and the only way they've been able to successfully do that is because of the roundabouts.
Speaker 1:Totally, and I'll say too, it's not that they're doing it because they're trying to have less people necessarily driving in cars or anything, it's because it's more efficient. They're finding the same thing that we found even in Austin, texas. There's obviously we've talked about the Barton Springs Road pilot. They had a road diet on Barton Springs Road traffic calming nice bike lanes, better bus stops, all of this sort of stuff and as a result, the traffic travel times in a vehicle were unchanged. They did not change. It was like plus or minus a couple seconds in either direction depending on the time of day.
Speaker 1:So, done in conjunction with things like roundabouts, again, it can have positive network effects for folks driving, but also, importantly, for folks biking, walking, all this sort of stuff. And I think it's pretty neat to to you highlighted this that, um, oftentimes, when we think about places that do this sort of thing, um, and it shouldn't be this way, uh, and when this comes out last week's episode we'll have talked a little bit about this um, it happens generally in more left-leaning areas. You've got like cities with democrat run uh, mayors, city councils, all this sort of stuff, who are kind of pushing these sorts of initiatives. This is happening in Indiana, yeah.
Speaker 2:I like the idea that if you were to do something like a blind test or something, if you were to describe what Carmel Indiana is doing to a group of people who don't know anything about this town, you don't say the name of the town. They're going to guess it's somewhere like New York or Portland or Seattle or maybe Chicago, austin, these sort of larger liberal cities where, as the road guy puts it, he feels like there's kind of a war on cars in these bigger cities. I don't fully subscribe to that in most big liberal cities, but that's what people are going to assume. It's a democratic liberal city that's doing this. It's 100% not Right.
Speaker 2:Carmel Indiana is a suburb of Indianapolis. It is in a red state. The suburb itself has had a Republican mayor for as long back as I could see on the elections they're represented in Congress by a Republican. They haven't elected a Democrat since 1993 to Congress. They voted for Mike Pence. They are very much a Democrat. Since 1993 to Congress they voted for Mike Pence. They are very much a red community in a red state.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, this is just one more thing of how these things can be bipartisan. We just need to be like framing the conversations in the right way so you know, when we talk about a road diet, like at first, people can take that and be like oh my God, you're, you know you're trying to to quote the thing you've mentioned a couple times you're taking away my God-given right to drive a car, my God-given right to a car.
Speaker 1:No, it's like hey, we've actually looked into this quite a bit. If you do it in conjunction with these other things, we're going to save everybody's time and it's going to be safer for everybody.
Speaker 2:We're going to save money absolutely.
Speaker 1:I want to add one more little positive here that I missed before. Roundabouts in general can be better for the environment. If you think about it, you've got in general, just like less stopping and starting At a red light, you get a stop. You need to then, like, accelerate more in the beginning, burn more fossil fuels. No idling cars, exactly. So that's an important thing. Yep, it's a lot of benefits here. I guess you want to add anything to the benefits?
Speaker 2:Well, the only thing I want to say is and this is kind of a benefit to Carmel is the fact that the biking infrastructure they've created with this is really remarkable. I mean, now it's rated one of the best cities to bike in in the country and again, when you think of the most bikeable places in the country, you don't think of really red. You know Indiana, but this is very much the case there, and one of the reasons they've been able to do that is as they build out these roundabouts on the roadways and they're able to shrink the number of lanes because the cars are more moving, more efficiently. They're now also adding these usually about 10 foot wide, multi-use paths following all these roads right, and they're not only just connecting these multi-use paths to a smaller sidewalk where it will then funnel in. They are sometimes adding them next to existing sidewalks, but they are. They are building this larger multi-use network in conjunction with making cars, uh, the traveling by car, more efficient and making the intersection safer.
Speaker 1:It sounds really awesome, yeah, I definitely think we need to go check it out. I agree, no, I think it would be. And I'm curious if anyone has been to Carmel or is from there. Please definitely let us know. And I know too, in this case, like this is not like a big city by any means, this is a small city. It's kind of a suburb of Indianapolis. So, city, it's kind of a suburb of of indianapolis. So, you know, are some of the things that they're doing applicable everywhere? Maybe not to the same extent. However, I mean they're making it happen. They're also. I mean it's, it's a pretty suburban area. We've talked about the suburbs, we've talked about all the sort of stuff before, so I feel like this was a fun uh connection here. Um, a couple negatives they're not, they're not a ton. I mean I'm after diving deeper into this definitely we're pretty're pretty pro-roundabout.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the negatives, though they can obviously physically take up more space. If you're trying to retrofit a roundabout somewhere, if the buildings are fairly close to the road, you just might not be able to make it happen. Necessarily. You might need to use eminent domain if you really wanted to put one in, or just purchasing the land to put one in. It's going to potentially be more money, um so so that's a negative.
Speaker 2:And then chris, already alluded to this second one that, uh yeah, americans are confused by roundabouts. I don't know why that's the case, but we just don't know how to really use them in a lot of cases until they've been there for a while. You know, growing up in mobile al, alabama, they built a couple of roundabouts later before, just before I moved to Texas, and all I would hear when people would bring it up is I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do, and it's like you just drive onto it and you treat it like an exit, like you just know which street you have to get off on. And I would see people do like three loops around the roundabout before they finally figured out how to use it.
Speaker 1:Totally, yeah, around the roundabout before they finally figured out how to use it. Totally, yeah, no, I mean, I, after going through this again, I think it's a no-brainer in a lot of cases. We I think that there are a lot of applications where we could see them. You know, utilize here, where we live, in austin, if, wherever you live, if, uh, again, I, uh, I actually think noah actually has a form now you can fill out if you would like to see, if you have a bad intersection um, if that exists, I will.
Speaker 1:I will link it. If you have an intersection, I let us know too, but maybe he'll make a short with his nice graphics and everything for you we have at least one in town, one roundabout, at least one at least at least one like really um heavily trafficked one. Yep, is it the same one that I wrote on here that you 51st and I didn't? I didn't read ahead.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so okay yeah, so our really busy roundabout here in town is the one on 51st street and I-35. Yeah, uh, and it's only one side of the interstate exit, which is kind of odd, yeah.
Speaker 1:I live just off of 51st street and anytime I'm headed over to Mueller for anything, which isn't that often but sometimes I have to go to Best Buy a lot to buy hard drives for work um, I just I got terabytes on terabytes, on terabytes, frankly. So I'll go to Best Buy last minute and I do bike through that intersection, and it's definitely better than crossing the other I-35 intersections in some ways. In other ways, though, because there are not that many of them around, people like don't yield to me all the time, like I really have to like'm like waving at someone, and sometimes, if I'm there and I go out there and one car just blows by me, then you get like six cars in a row that just fully ignore you. I mean, those have raised crosswalks too. So I think you know done correctly, yes, they're, they're gonna be great that one. I think if there are more of them around, uh, it could, it could be better. I also think that that one could be narrower and it would, it would make the crossing there better, but I I do like it better than just having, uh, the alternative, be what so many of the other crossings of i-35 are, which kind of leave you about to dry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, cool, well, uh, that's about it for this one. Let us know what you think about this episode. Also, if you have not checked out our Patreon some weeks, you'll get access to episodes early. Sometimes the episodes will be a little bit longer. For example, there was a couple extra minutes in the Austin in a Day using only public transit that didn't make it to YouTube but that are in the full Patreon version. Folks got early access to the interview with Transit Forward. You know it might not be a full week early in some cases, but if we get an episode edited a couple of days ahead of time, you'll get it first on Patreon. But really it's just like if you like what we're doing and you want to support us, that's a good way to do so.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. It gives us a chance to travel to other places with that little bit of extra support and really focus on bringing you, uh, really cool and fun and engaging content. Totally, um like for instance, on this episode. Um, if you have some quirky transit thing in your city that you want us to talk about, this is a good opportunity to uh subscribe to the patreon, join our discord and then put it in the discord in the episode ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we actually we had our our first uh patreon person who made it into the Discord this is a week or two ago at this point Got in there and it's fun to now be able to have folks in the Discord with us, so it's not just Chris and I talking back and forth to each other. So there's a couple different options you can choose from on Patreon, that'd be great. If you haven't liked the video or subscribed here on YouTube, that's a big help. And if you're listening on a podcast platform, consider giving us five stars and sharing it with your friends. Yeah, absolutely, but without further ado. Thank you all so much for watching this episode of Transit Tangents.
Speaker 2:And enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents. Tuesday yeah, I'm saving that dough. Public transit's where it's at.
Speaker 1:Watch me go.