THE ROUNDABOUT WAY TO REDUCE EMISSIONS
My wife and I went out to dinner last night. Our town doesn’t have a lot of options so we went to a nearby city. Inconveniences like that are just something you get used to when you live in a small town. While we enjoy visiting the more developed areas, it takes no more than a few moments to remember why we left. When returning home last night we sat at several traffic lights for what felt like an eternity. In reality it was probably no more than a minute or two at each light, waiting, as no other cars were in sight. I would imagine you can relate though. Time never moves slower than waiting at an empty intersection.
I thought more about this the whole way home. We had sat idling for what i calculated was probably around three minutes. Now I know that seems like nothing. But I started doing some rough math in my head, assisted by some google searches. I was trying to figure out just how much total time Americans spend waiting at unnecessary traffic lights. Let me tell you. The results are staggering. Here are some quick bits;
The average American spends 4 months of their life waiting at traffic lights
The average American driver spends 20% of their time behind the wheel waiting at lights
3,520 minutes is the average tie each driver waits each year
That time waiting is only half of the story. Because remember, while you are waiting, your engine is still running. Chugging up gasoline and spitting out CO2 so that you can go exactly nowhere. If you thought the data about the lost time was depressing, just wait for this.
40 minutes of idling burns a gallon of gasoline
A pound of CO2 comes out of your tailpipe every 10 minutes
352 pounds per year per driver
with 117 million drivers thats well over a billion pounds a year
The further i dug, the more upset I became by the data. The only solace I could find was in searching for solutions. Then I remembered a past trip to Europe my wife took. You may see where this is going. If you’ve ever driven in say England you likely noticed a different type of traffic pattern to solve the problem of intersections. The infamous roundabout.
The beauty of the roundabout is that traffic often has no need to stop. This produces several benefits which have been proven by traffic studies. The main three are;
Roundabouts have significantly fewer fatal accidents
Roundabouts reduce carbon emissions
Roundabouts greatly reduce pedestrian accidents
If you want to learn more about the safety benefits, I recommend visiting the website for the roundabout appreciation society of England here. (Yes it’s a real thing). For our discussion we are going to focus only on the carbon emissions though.
An initial study found that replacing a traffic stop with a roundabout could reduce carbon emission by anywhere from 15 to 40 percent depending on the efficiency of the traffic light it was replacing. When we start to total it up is when things get interesting. The same study suggests that replacing 10% of the traffic stops in the United States with roundabout could save more than 650 millions gallons of gasoline every year.
What’s more about roundabouts is that the efficiency is not only confined to internal combustion engines. While reducing the idle running of gasoline engines is the most effective change, keep in mind that it would also reduce the amount of time that batteries of electric vehicles would be engaged, thus reducing the consumption of EV’s as well. While EV’s are certainly far better on the planet than combustion, in most areas the electricity they are consuming comes from questionable sources, so the less of it we use the better.
Love them or hate them, advocating for more roundabouts in the US is likely one of the most beneficial things we can be doing if we are looking to reduce the carbon impact of our driving habits. While nothing will completely solve the problem, every thing we can do helps.
One final note on safety, the US average is 12 automotive related deaths per 100,000 people. In Carmel Indiana, the city with the most roundabouts in the country, that average has been reduced to 2.
Bottom line, they work.