More Accidents, but Safer

(Meyer/Bay Area News Group)

It's big, complicated, and causes more accidents, but traffic experts call it a success. [bold added]

When a turbo roundabout rolled into the southernmost corner of the Bay Area early last year, it became the first-in-the-state adoption of a successful Dutch traffic innovation — a multi-lane roundabout shaped like a cartoon hurricane.

And while the roundabout in San Benito County, far south of San Jose, was meant to improve safety, it brought with it a wave of confusion and a spike in accidents that saw drivers colliding at rates many times higher than before it was installed...

A Mercury News analysis of crash data shows that crashes skyrocketed at the intersection in the year after the turbo roundabout was completed. But even as accidents have soared, serious injuries and deaths have disappeared, leaving many to assert that the roundabout is safer...

While a Mercury News analysis showed a spike of crashes around the roundabout when it was first completed, experts promised that crash rates would decrease over time.

So far, though, that hasn’t been the case.

When we wrote about the roundabout last year, we hoped that South Bay drivers would climb the learning curve quickly. Alas, their proximity to Silicon Valley appears not to have rubbed off.