Vallory Cannon slowed down, looked left to see if there was any oncoming traffic, saw none, entered a roundabout, and then stopped the car to talk.
“I was saying it’s different when you are driving in a roundabout and someone behind you is honking or tailgating,” Ms. Cannon, 64, a Head Start assistant teacher in Toledo.
Ms. Cannon was one of about 20 people who showed up for a beginner's exercise Sunday at a mock roundabout in Sylvania. She was in the middle of driving in the roundabout when she stopped to talk to an instructor. The single-lane mock roundabout in the parking lot of the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles office off McCord Road in Sylvania was marked with orange cones.
“I used to be petrified of roundabouts, but I feel better now,” Ms. Cannon said after completing the beginners exercise Sunday. “It was just one big circle.”
She looks forward to the next step, she said.
Titled “Roundabouts for Beginners,” the exercise teaches participants to “slow down, look left, and yield to any oncoming traffic.”
“It went very well,” another participant, Colleen O’Brien, 80, a retired Toledo waitress, said once she too completed the exercise. “I just got into my little Fiat and followed the car in front of me and then I just followed the directions of the gentleman who was navigating the whole affair.”
Ms. O’Brien said the exercise was easy for her as well and that she would be looking forward to a more challenging one.
“This particular kind of one that we did here today I would consider the easiest. We weren’t out on a double-laner or off the expressway,” Ms. O’Brien said.
“I’ve been on them whether I wanted to or not,” she said. “...It would be better if they could have more directional signs that either were words saying, ‘turn left or turn right at this point,’ or just nav arrows, or the names of the roads, where you can look up and see them.”
At least one driver did not appear to find the exercise agreeable.
While Ms. Cannon was talking upon the completion of the exercise, someone leaned on the horn while driving the circle and then drove away, leaving event organizers and the attending media guessing why.
A more realistic exercise is being planned in the summer upon the completion of a new roundabout that’s under construction in Sylvania Township.
Natalie Haase, Lucas County traffic safety health educator, said the roundabout at Brint and Centennial roads, which is expected to become operational in the second week of May, was chosen as the site of the exercise, which would likely entail a temporary road closure to regular traffic.
Event organizers included Toledo-Lucas County Health Department, Toledo Driving Schools, the Lucas County engineer’s office, and Ohio State Highway Patrol.
With roundabouts, especially for large crash-causing intersections, “you're not having two vehicles come up and T-boned each other where you're having serious injuries. So, these roundabouts actually help reduce a lot of injuries,” said state patrol Sgt. Jason Metzger.
“The problem is that there will be some people that aren't paying attention. They're trying to watch traffic to their left,” Sergeant Metzger said at Sunday’s event. “However, you still want to pay attention to the car that's in front of you.”
It is also important to keep in mind that when entering a double-lane roundabout, one has to yield to all traffic because vehicles in the roundabout may change lanes at any time, event organizers said. The use of turn signals in a roundabout is not mandatory, they noted.
Ms. Haase said roundabouts remain a problem to some drivers, who “go out of their way to avoid roundabouts.”
“So, we just wanted them out here to get them comfortable to ask questions to law enforcement about what they should do in certain situations,” she said. “Our hope for the future is to go [for training] to an active roundabout site.”
First Published April 16, 2023, 8:48 p.m.
