Traffic Circle - History

History

French architect Eugène Hénard was designing one-way circular intersections as early as 1877. American architect William Phelps Eno favored small traffic circles. He designed New York City's famous Columbus Circle, which was built in 1905. Other circular intersections were subsequently built in the United States, though many were large diameter 'rotaries' that enabled high speed merge and weave maneuvers. These designs were doomed to failure for two primary reasons:

• It takes a large diameter circle to provide enough room for merging at speed. Although some of these circles were huge (many were in excess of 100 meters or 300 feet in diameter), they weren't large enough for high-speed merging.
• Giving priority to entering traffic means that more vehicles can enter the circulatory roadway than it can handle. The result is congestion within the circle which could not clear without police intervention.

The experience with traffic circles and rotaries in the US was almost entirely negative, characterized by high accident rates and congestion problems. By the mid 1950s, construction of traffic circles and rotaries had ceased entirely. The experience with traffic circles in other countries was not much better until the development of the modern roundabout in the United Kingdom during the 1960s.