As a driver who crosses Sterretts Gap with some frequency, I can tell you that the intersection of Sunnyside Drive and SR-34 is no picnic.
It’s often evening as the Olshans are climbing Sunnyside Drive up the southern face of Blue Mountain. The Cumberland Valley falls away to the left, its lights twinkling far below, as if we’re climbing to altitude in a jet, not a Subaru. As if the steepness of the climb weren’t excitement enough, when we finally crest the mountain and come to the stop sign, there’s the prospect of merging onto SR-34. You practically have to be a barn owl to twist your head enough to see the oncoming traffic.
Approaching Sterretts Gap from the Perry County side is no great pleasure, either. As we slow to make the left onto Sunnyside Drive, I often wish our car had a booster rocket, in case a motorcycle comes screaming up SR-34 from Carlisle just as we’re rolling into the turn.
Recently, in the pages of this venerable publication, I read about a proposal to build a roundabout at this intersection, the better to keep traffic moving.
My first thought was selfish: “How long is it going to take them to build this crazy thing?” Building a roundabout doesn’t seem so hard until you factor in the tight quarters at the top of a mountain. But those tight quarters do raise another practical question: where is traffic supposed to go in the meantime?
No doubt there’ll be a carefully considered plan for rerouting traffic. But then another question started to gnaw at me: why so expensive? To quote my estimable colleague Thom Casey: “Costs for the project are estimated to be around $3 million.”
Three million dollars? For a roundabout?
Of course, that figure was followed up by the kind of disclaimer that warms the heart of even the most virulent government-hater: “The project would be funded with state and federal funds.”
Which is supposed to lessen the sting, despite the fact that, as state and federal taxpayers, we’re ultimately picking up the tab — albeit with the help of a much larger tax base.
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in Washington, D.C., a city with many traffic circles — the larger, less efficient, and more accident-prone cousins of roundabouts. Learning to negotiate these circles has been a rite of passage for generation after generation of terrified student drivers. Among the worst of all is Chevy Chase circle, a demonic traffic feature at the northern border of the city with Maryland. Several key avenues dump raging streams of traffic into Chevy Chase circle, which requires you either to zoom across lanes like a maniac, or defend your lane against other zooming maniacs.
I don’t know who came up with the nickname, “Suicide Circle,” but it was apt, and it stuck.
To this day, my mother-in-law prefers an absurdly circuitous back way involving side streets, stop signs, and bone-jarring speed bumps, to the high-speed horrors of Suicide Circle, which is all of two blocks from her house.
The traffic circles in Washington, D.C. predate the automobile by more than a hundred years. Actually, they’re the brainchild of the Frenchman Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a favorite of General — and then President — George Washington, and the man whose design underlies our Nation’s Capital. L’Enfant, a veteran of the American Revolution, and one of the premiere civil engineers of his day, lobbied President Washington for the privilege of designing the capital of the fledgling republic.
L’Enfant’s vision of the city was a perfect grid, laid out in impeccable Enlightenment style, with bold diagonal avenues named for the states. At the intersection of these diagonal intrusions on an otherwise horizontal and vertical universe of streets, there would be public squares…and circles.
So the idea for the traffic circle was born long before there was high-speed traffic to test out the concept.
Circles were an excellent solution to keep slow-moving traffic, well, moving, rather than force it to a complete stop at an intersection. But as the wealth of the city grew, and horse-drawn traffic increased significantly, circles began to cause confusion and growing numbers of accidents.
The circle did even worse by the automobile. Traffic circles were completely out of favor by the 1950s. It wasn’t until the European refinement of the roundabout, which is much better suited for cars than the traffic circle, that civil engineers began turning once again to the circle to help increase the efficiency of busy intersections.
In summary: a roundabout at Sterretts Gap is probably a good idea in the long run, but look out for a big pain in the Gap getting there.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 14 October 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
