The Poynton Roundabout
Author photo.
My Facebook memories just showed me a picture of a traffic control device. It’s a picture I actually made a detour to take a couple of years ago when I was in the north of England.
Why did I drag my husband to a suburb of Manchester, England to look at a traffic circle? It’s a famous traffic circle: it’s one of the first major ‘shared space’ traffic constructions outside of the Netherlands, where the practice has a much longer history.
The circle, which is actually more like two circles, is technically known as a woonerf, a Dutch word for a street which accommodates powered vehicles, bicyclists, and pedestrians equally. Unlike most streets,where cars and trucks have the right of way all the time, this intersection is designed to put all the users on an equal footing.
It’s in a town called Poynton, and it manages an intersection of five major roads, which previously rendered the center of this little town a wasteland of asphalt and car exhaust. Now, as you see from the picture, it’s much, much better looking and much safer. It’s designed so that car drivers have to look at and make eye contact with pedestrians and bikers. They also have to drive slowly so that conflicts, when they arise, can be dealt with before a collision.
My husband and I stood there for 30 minutes, watching and taking pictures. I saw big articulated trucks make the necessary turns, I saw box trucks, I saw pedestrians, kids on scooters, and bicyclists successfully get where they needed to go smoothly and easily. I tried out the ability of a pedestrian to step off the sidewalk at any point and cross the street. When I stepped off, the drivers saw me and stopped. It was amazing! Fortunately my husband, Hugh, who is a good sport, is a UX designer and appreciated what he was seeing as a design solution.
So why did I bother to stand there and gawk at this piece of infrastructure? Because how we build our places determines how we live in them, and whether we are happy and healthy. As an urban planner I want places to be beautiful, because it turns out that beauty matters to our happiness and our health. Too many places in the United States are not arranged for the happiness of the people who live there, they are arranged to move traffic as quickly as possible.
I went to Poynton because when I advocate for shared spaces and slower traffic and increasing the pedestrian and bicyclist share of the road I want to be able to say: I have seen this, and it works. It works for truck drivers and it works for little old ladies on Dutch bicycles. There’s a documentary about the Poynton rotary where residents talked about how hard it was to cross the street to get to the shops on the other side of the square before the intersection was rebuilt and how much better it is now.
How we build our places matters: when it’s hard to bike or walk, people don’t. When we build places where the houses are miles away from the shops, we drive everywhere. When we build ugly places or allow places to become neglected, the people suffer. We can do better. Poynton is proof.
