Local City Planners Respond to Motorists:

It'll Be A Roundabout

Loveland—Multiple complaints regarding the series of five roundabouts along the road which connects the new Loveland hospital with Eisenhower Road has generated a survey by traffic experts. They concluded that it was premature to make any judgments on whether the roundabouts actually increased accidents. The study was paid for by a local construction consortium.

An assistant to city planners spoke frankly; “We think the problem is that people who live in Colorado may not be smart enough to use roundabouts. Maybe it has to do with blood oxygen levels.”

A local consumer advocacy group quickly retorted that perhaps the first exposure to how a roundabout works should not occur when someone is attempting to reach the hospital in an emergency.

In Fort Collins, a sigh of relief went up when the roundabout planned for Mulberry and Lemay was found to be cost prohibitive. Local resident Heather Singleton voiced her concerns: “I just couldn’t imagine what the city planners were thinking. That intersection has significant truck traffic. I drive a Mini Cooper; I could be crushed like a grape beneath Lucy Riccardo’s toes if I had to share the roundabout with an 18-wheeler.”

A member of the Long-Term Planning and Environmental Studies Group, which guides local cities confided to The Bull’s Underbelly, “We knew that there would be close calls and that motorists would experience a learning curve, but in the long run, it was much easier to deal with traffic congestion through creative routing rather than invest in more sophisticated engineering and software for tracking lights, and traffic flow and density. We had to look at local talent, and when we did, we realized that we really have a lack of computer and engineering expertise in our population. We just don’t have a crop of out- of-work software engineers who might want to tackle a project with so little impact.”

A father who had just driven with his teenage daughter through the roundabout on Taft Hill Road emerged from his car visibly shaken. “Three times around and two near- misses. This, I believe, is why my wife suggested that we send our daughter to driving school.”