San Pedro roundabout ends downtown traffic headache
$6 million project was envisioned to fix confusing intersection
The Rev. Michael Passmore, pastor of Central Christian Church downtown, once looked out at the urban mess of stoplights, frustrated drivers and concrete clutter outside his stately Georgian-style house of worship and wondered how any newcomers actually found the place.
It could take 10 minutes during rush hour, he said, to get through a stoplight at the twisting intersection where Camden, Navarro and Soledad collided with San Pedro and Main.
“Now there’s hardly any wait. Our entrance is visible and welcoming, and even attendance is up,” Passmore said.
He can thank the city’s first multilane traffic roundabout, a $6 million affair that has been open to traffic for about six months.
Constructed as part of the 2012-2017 bond program, what’s known as the San Pedro roundabout is surrounded by Passmore’s church, Baptist Medical Center, the enchilada red Central Library and Fox Tech High School.
It was envisioned by planners and pushed by District 1 City Councilman Roberto Treviño as not just an engineering device to improve traffic flow and reduce crashes, but an architectural feature to enliven the west end of downtown.
“We are definitely pleased,” said Mike Frisbie, outgoing director of the city’s Transportation and Capital Improvements Department. “In the traffic business, we go by ‘levels of service,’ and previously this intersection had an F-minus level of service.”
The old intersection was confusing, and thus dangerous for pedestrians and bicyclists, he said. With two sets of traffic lights within a very short distance, a nor-
mally busy two-lane flow of downtown traffic couldn’t move smoothly. Sometimes the last cars sneaking through on yellow would block cross traffic and tempers would boil.
“It was an intersection to be avoided,” Frisbie said.
But now, after some initial befuddlement, drivers are deftly navigating the Euro-style roundabout at calm speeds, without much brake-pumping. White arrows on the pavement show motorists what options they have from the inside or outside lanes, and a slight bend to the right before you enter — called a deflection — visually prepares drivers to slow down and be aware.
“I’ve been in roundabouts in Paris, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Mexico City, and sometimes they can be horn-honking nightmares,” Passmore said. “But this one is working.”
The San Pedro roundabout — planners resist calling them mere “traffic circles” — also includes a sculpture in the middle, “Three and Ten Flowers,” by artist James Surls.
Humble, one-lane neighborhood traffic circles have been in place in San Antonio for decades. A relatively new one on McCullough in Olmos Park had its fountain wrecked at least twice by drivers who weren’t expecting it and who faced DWI charges afterward. The circle now features a decorative xeriscape with cactus.
But the grand multilane variety common in Europe and South America, where they can be lined with wide sidewalks and chatty outdoor cafes, are relatively rare anywhere in the U.S., a nation of stoplights where you are about 25 times less likely to arrive at a roundabout than in France, according to RoundaboutsUSA.
Even the utilitarian variety, such as the San Pedro roundabout, has yet to fully catch on. Austin opened its first multilane roundabout earlier this year at 51st and the southbound Interstate 35 frontage road. New Braunfels has long had one surrounding its courthouse-adjacent plaza.
Carmel, Indiana, population about 96,000, has more than 100 roundabouts, the most of any U.S. city. Florida has the most of any state — 1,283 — but many have stop signs and other oddities, transportation website CityLab reported. They all but disappear in Western states.
The safety benefits of roundabouts have been widely documented. They have reduced injury-causing crashes by about 75 percent at intersections where stop signs and signals used to be present, according to research by the American Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
The gradual merging around a circle virtually eliminates deadly 90-degree or T-bone collisions, researchers say. The San Antonio Police Department was unable to provide collision statistics for the San Pedro roundabout. Passmore said he was unaware of any since it opened that required hospitalization.
The appearance of circular traffic tends to slow approaching drivers, and with no red lights present there are no red light runners or signal light malfunctions. (Some larger European multilane roundabouts do use signals at their entrances, especially at rush hours.)
And with no idling of vehicles at stoplights, roundabouts save gas.
Carmel’s Republican mayor, James Brainard, said in 2016 that using Federal Highway Administration research showing that about 24,000 gallons of gas are saved per year per roundabout, his residents would be saving around $4.9 million annually in gas.
Building roundabouts in his city, Brainard told CityLab, has cost about $250,000 less than building a signalized intersection, and the signal-free roundabouts saved nearly $5,000 annually just in electricity costs.
With fewer stops and delays, roundabouts have also shown that they can move between 30 and 50 percent more vehicles, thus reducing drive time.
So, why haven’t Texas and other states more aggressively adopted roundabouts?
“It still tends to be fear of the unknown,” said Marcus Brewer, a research engineer with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. “The resistance is often along the lines of, ‘We can leave well enough alone,’ or ‘I know how to drive them, but I don’t trust other people.’ ”
But Brewer said a town’s opposition to roundabouts prior to their installation often does an about-face after people experience them. Roundabouts often have a larger footprint than traditional four-way stop intersections, and the initial cost, which can include the purchase of rights of way, might scare off smaller cities if they don’t have state or federal assistance, he said.
The benefits of reduced vehicle maintenance, crash and delay reduction, and elimination of signal upkeep and malfunctions pay off in the long run, Brewer said.
Frisbie said other locations in San Antonio, such as the area around the Alamo, would be logical spots to place future roundabouts but that none is explicitly in the planning stages. He said future projects would likely be packaged within bond programs, as was the San Pedro roundabout.
“We would definitely like to do more because of the efficiency and aesthetics,” Frisbie said. “But they work best when you have five or more legs of traffic coming together. Trucks must also be accommodated, and you have to have the space.”
Passmore said rain and other factors delayed the San Pedro roundabout construction but that “it’s all worth it now.”
“We love having the roundabout here,” he said. “We like being part of the community.”