Letter to the Editor: Another roundabout in Illinois is about to become a success

Having read the recent discussions about the 48^th and State intersection, I hope the community does not get a negative impression of roundabouts (traffic circles) for future use.

I grew up just north of Utica between Interstate 80 and Starved Rock State Park. There is now a very effective circle intersection at the junction of U.S. Route 6 and Illinois Route 178 that has replaced the old four corners stop-lighted malfunction junction that the local community was faced with in the past. From what I have heard, the community now looks favorably on the change.

On a given spring-summer-fall weekend, cars would be backed up all the way to Route I-80 to the north and halfway to the actual town of Utica a mile south waiting for the lights to change at this two-lane intersection.

Old U.S. Route 6 still exists mostly as a two-lane road going from Cape Cod, Mass., to the California border basically in parallel with I-80 as the road going east-west and Illinois Route 178 from the north to the south going through Utica to Starved Rock State Park.  

It is reported that IDOT got the work done for about $2.4 million in 2022-23 with a grand opening a year ago for Memorial Day weekend.  Yes, everything keeps going up in cost these days, but maybe the City of Quincy and/or Adams County should examine IDOT’s line-item cost for the Utica project versus line-item quotes for the Quincy project for apples-to-apples comparisons.   There are 101 reasons these days why cost keeps going up, so looking at past recent history for a reference can’t hurt.  

I remember my days driving in the Cambridge, England metro area and Malaysia to and from the morning-early evening commute, hardly ever stopping for a light or stop sign while driving on the left side of the road with clockwise traffic circles.  

It’s an interesting paradox. Many Americans don’t like waiting and wasting time, and the roundabout has been proven to save time, energy and materials. However, it has never caught on in the U.S. like it did in the United Kingdom and other places.  

If you ran a stopwatch east to west on Broadway and clocked the best case/worst case transit time between all green and all full cycle periods of red lights, you would see how much time we waste each day at intersections. While the U.K. pays more for gas, they get more distance per time traveled and use less gas per mile traveled while also saving on brake work. When it takes less time to go from point A to point B, that means that during that time, there will be fewer vehicles between those points.

Four-lane traffic becomes less in value. The right lane on a four-lane intersection has to be a right-turn-only option.  A city could have a street like Broadway become two lanes with a middle-left turn lane along the road and the two outside existing lanes becoming right turns only to off streets and business and use by emergency vehicles.    

Gone would be the people weaving in and out of lanes at high speed to make up time lost with red lights or just being poor aggressive drivers and wanting another ticket.   Also gone would be the intersection rest period stops to read and send text messages.  Repairs and re-pavements would be less intrusive to traffic flow.  You could more easily shut down longer sections of two lanes of a road for maintenance on a given street like Broadway, saving repair time and the cost of those potholes and water mains.   

This situation can never exist now on Broadway, based on the past and present preferred buildouts of business locations next to intersections. Maybe other intersections in the community can someday be considered in future plans, or maybe some young person going into the field of civil engineering and highway management might read this and put it in their toolbox of ideas for planning a layout for a long line of traffic similar to Broadway in Somewhere USA.  

The intersection of Locust and 36^th Street next to the U.S. Post Office, with its challenging left turns from Locust, would be a good site for a three-port roundabout.

Recently in my hometown of Utica, I went out of my way to use the new roundabout. I must admit to having fun going through it several times.

Don Carpenter
Quincy, Illinois