Round and Round We Go!

Top left: animal trough, Top Right: Flag pole & Traffic Light
Bottom: New Five Points Roundabout!

Perhaps you have lived in cities that have roundabouts and you are used to them. For those of us who grew up in Sarasota, for many years, there were only a few of them – St. Armand’s Circle, Five Points in downtown Sarasota and and Southgate Circle where Siesta Drive and Tuttle meet up. But now…WOW! It seems they are popping up everywhere to confuse and confound us with first, the construction and then…how to navigate them. So I got curious about them and here’s a little history.

Roundabouts, also known as traffic circles and rotaries, have been around almost a century, with the first documented one in the U.S. built in 1905 on the southwest corner of Central Park in New York City and named after Christopher Columbus. Carmel, California now has more than 125 roundabouts, more than any other city in the United States. Half of the world's roundabouts are in France although the United Kingdom has more as a proportion of the road than any other country. There are no official statistics, but estimates of the total number of traffic circles in France range from 20,000 to 50,000. 

In the United States — about 18 times bigger and five times more populous than France — the figure is closer to 5,000. One national study of roundabout trends found about 1,300 of them in Florida, more than any other state in the nation!

Although a seemingly new concept here in Sarasota to assist traffic flow or cause major mayhem...depending on your point of view...the roundabout has been a part of the local Sarasota scene since before Henry Ford’s Model T put the masses on wheels and in hospitals, according to local historian, Jeff LaHurd. Sarasota, in fact, was among the first communities in Florida, if not the entire United States, to center an object in the middle of an intersection and expect pedestrians and their conveyances to circumnavigate without bodily harm. Around 1887, John Hamilton Gillespie placed a public trough in the center of Five Points, at the time Sarasota’s busiest intersection, where Main Street, Pineapple and Mango (today’s Central Avenue) converged.

That was about 23 years before Sarasota’s first car to town, and while it did not have to share the roadway, there is no documentation that a car ever came in contact with a person or a horse-drawn buggy while circling the intersection. The trough was replaced in 1917 by a flag pole dedicated to Sarasota’s soldiers and sailors who were then fighting in Europe during World War I. No one argued that automobiles, then starting to make their presence felt downtown, could not get around it without running into one another. Along the small base was the simple but prudent instruction, “Keep To The Right.” Visionary developer John Ringling also must have been a proponent of traffic circles. His 1925 sales brochure for Ringling Isles featured Harding Place, a roundabout known today as St. Armand’s Circle. 

And as to Five Points downtown, the slim flag pole with the small base standing like a lonely sentinel in the

middle of the street was replaced by a more formidable roundabout, the American Legion War Memorial. It, too, was dedicated to the doughboys of World War I. A traffic light was affixed to it, topped off with a flag pole. Around the base, in bold letters, “KEEP TO RIGHT” and “NO LEFT TURN”. Liz’s Dad, artist John Hardy, depicted it in a two-page spread in the Sarasota Herald Tribune in 1951 as ‘The Hub of a Great Art Center’ in a wonderful drawing. But in 1954, the State Road Department bestowed upon it the term “traffic hazard.” And away it went, rolled down to Gulf Stream Avenue and placed in today’s Rev. J.D. Hamel Park, leaving South Gate Circle from the 1950s, and St. Armands Circle as the area’s roundabouts. Very recently, that has all changed.

Today, roundabouts are all the rage in Sarasota, in both senses of the word, keeping the flow of traffic moving safely and more efficiently -- or not. The roundabouts in the City of Sarasota have been part of city’s vision to improve connectivity and traffic flow for at least 20 years. That vision came to life when the traffic lights at Five Points were torn down in 2010 to make way for downtown’s central intersection roundabout. Now, there are eight completed roundabouts in the city and three under construction. These projects are expected to help alleviate traffic woes along U.S. 41 in northern Sarasota, while beautifying the area and boosting business at many of the struggling intersections. The roundabouts, to be built incrementally, also were designed to encourage more pedestrian traffic and so we are back to the days of our parents and grandparents...walking around downtown! 

For those of us who are NOT used to driving around them, here's a great video about how to navigate roundabouts: