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After construction finishes, Rob Yerxa, head of the Orono Public Works Department, will be watching the new roundabout on Stillwater Avenue closely.
Construction on an approximately $800,000 roundabout at the intersection of Stillwater and Forest avenues will likely start next fall and may last into spring 2013.
The project’s designer says accidents resulting in injury and damage will decrease by more than 50 percent after the roundabout is installed.
But the town could have more to gain: A University of Maine expert says roundabouts are the solution to more Orono traffic woes.
Yerxa said he will be keeping an eye on the new roundabout to determine if one would make sense at Park Street’s intersection with Rangeley Road — one of the entrances to campus.
With the addition of Campus Crest’s 620-bed Grove housing complex up the street toward Old Town, slated to be available to renters next fall, the expected higher number of commuters headed to campus from that direction may strain the intersection.
The roundabout at Stillwater and Forest avenues is a Maine Department of Transportation project, but the town of Orono would need to find funding for a roundabout at the Rangeley Road and Park Street intersection.
“At this point the big challenge would be, ‘How the heck are we going to pay for it?’” Yerxa said.
“MDOT had recognized we’d need to do some kind of signal or device” at the intersection, said Orono Town Manager Sophie Wilson, adding that the town is currently leaning toward installing a stoplight at the intersection. “We’ve really not engaged in any discussion.”
‘People get tired of waiting’
But a stoplight would just exacerbate the problem at the Rangeley Road and Park Street intersection, according to Per Garder, a UMaine civil and environmental engineering professor.
“The average delay would be longer with a stoplight,” Garder said in his office Friday, adding that stopping a lane of traffic to start another slows traffic flow.
A student project — a thick sheaf of papers with a cover illustration of a roundabout at the intersection of Stillwater and College avenues — was close at hand as he spoke. A list of maps showing traffic accidents in the Bangor area was displayed on the computer screen.
In 2000, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety published a report co-written by Garder that summarized a study of 24 intersections nationwide replaced by roundabouts. The study found that crashes at intersections fell 39 percent after a roundabout was built, while collisions serious enough to cause fatalities or debilitating injuries dropped 90 percent.
“Today, people get tired of waiting so they go into unsafe gaps [in traffic],” Garder said. “A single-lane roundabout would eliminate daily delays.”
He said periods of heavy traffic on campus, such as sporting events or moving days, would still cause backups.
If the roundabout were not built at the intersection, Garder said he expects more drivers would cut through Talmar Wood Apartments, a housing development between Rangeley Road and Park Street.
“It will be even harder than today to come from downtown Orono and make the left turn,” he said.
Reducing collisions
Garder said a single-lane roundabout at the intersection would almost fit within the current dimensions of the intersection. Yerxa said he wouldn’t expect significant environmental impact from installing one.
To Garder’s knowledge, the intersection is not a high-collision area, but a roundabout would increase the likelihood of drivers surviving collisions.
The majority of accidents within a roundabout are rear-end or side-swipe collisions, but accidents at intersections are likely to be more dangerous “T-bone” collisions.
Collisions on roundabouts also occur at lower speeds, since drivers must slow down to about 15 miles per hour in a single-lane roundabout. Drivers can blow through intersections at higher speeds, Garder said.
The decision for a roundabout at the Stillwater and Forest avenues intersection was based on the frequency of collisions there.
“There were 8 crashes in a 3 year period (2008-2010), with 3 of those being injury crashes, and in a 6 year period (2005-2010) there were 22 total crashes, 8 of those being injury crashes,” wrote MDOT Highway Project designer Jonathan French, a 2002 UMaine graduate and a former student of Garder’s, in an email.
He added that the “majority of those crashes were T-bone collisions which a roundabout would eliminate as the impact angles are greatly reduced.”
According to French, the roundabout is expected to reduce total collisions by 57 percent per year, collisions resulting in injury by 73 percent and those resulting in damage to vehicles by 52 percent.
Ninety percent of the project’s costs, which French said won’t be finalized until a construction bid is awarded, will be funded federally. The remainder will be funded by the state.
The Rangeley Road and Park Street intersection does not see as many collisions. Yerxa described the situation there as “more of a traffic flow issue.”
Park Street price tag
Garder said the costs for a roundabout, which include an estimate for construction and a designer’s contract for a year, can be as high as $1 million.
Yerxa agreed that would be a reasonable maximum estimate, which is why the town is also considering installing a stoplight.
A stoplight would only cost as much as $500,000, according to Yerxa’s estimate, but he said a range of $250,000 to $300,000 would be more likely.
He said the town could request funding from the Bangor Area Comprehensive Transportation System, which organizes transportation in the greater Bangor area.
He said BACTS receives $12 million from the state each year and manages part or all of 11 municipalities, meaning funding could be stretched to translucency if those cities and towns all apply for funding for multiple projects.
“I think roundabouts sometimes are a really good solution,” Yerxa said.
He mentioned a roundabout on Maine Avenue in Bangor, near Bangor International Airport. Response to that roundabout has been positive, he said.
However, positive response is not enough to pay for a roundabout in Orono. That price tag worries Yerxa. For now, he’ll keep one eye on the Stillwater and Forest avenues roundabout and the other on the town coffers.
“The next time we’ll be selecting projects will be for the 2013-2014 construction season,” he said.
Bangor Daily News