One Indiana City Has More Roundabouts Than Any Other U.S. City

You won't believe how many roundabouts one Indiana city has. Spoiler Alert: it's more than any other city in the United States.

Over the past few decades, roundabouts have become more popular throughout the country. In case you don't know, a roundabout is a circular intersection or junction in which road traffic flows almost continuously in one direction around a central island. According to INDOT:

INDOT is using roundabouts to replace traditional four-way traffic signals to reduce accidents, traffic delays, fuel consumption, air pollution and construction costs, while improving safety, increasing capacity and enhancing intersection beauty. Roundabouts have been successfully used to reduce congestion in residential neighborhoods and are accepted as one of the safest types of intersection designs.

Here's a little diagram of how a roundabout works:

That sounds like a simple concept, right? When approaching a roundabout, you must first yield and look to your left for traffic and yield to all traffic that is already circulating the roundabout. Once traffic to your left has cleared, you proceed driving in a counterclockwise motion around the roundabout until you turn on whatever your desired road is. Most of us have driven on one here in Indiana, so we already know that. I mean, INDOT says that we have more than 400 in the state...and the majority of those can be found in one city that has been dubbed "the roundabout capital of the United States."

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This Indiana City Has More Roundabouts Than Any Other US City

If you live near this city, this comes as no surprise to you. However, if you don't, like myself, you might be surprised to find out that Carmel, Indiana has more roundabouts than any other city in the United States. How many roundabouts, you ask? We're talking about more than 150. That's a lot of roundabouts for a city of just over 102,000 people.

Since the late 1990’s Carmel has been building and replacing signalized intersections with roundabouts. As it turns out, the roundabouts in Carmel have paid off, too. The city of Carmel even shares some statistics:

Roundabouts move traffic more efficiently and reduce the number of fatalities and serious-injury accidents. They work because of their safety record, their compatibility with the environment, their aesthetics and their ability to make it easier for pedestrians and bicyclists to navigate.

The number of injury accidents in Carmel have reduced by about 80 percent and the number of accidents overall by about 40 percent. Our numbers are similar to those reported by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

 

So, the next time that someone asks you something that Indiana is known for, you can throw this little fun fact at them and then enjoy the conversation that follows about roundabouts. It seems like a lot of people are pretty opinionated about them for different reasons.