If the geometry works, town officials may recommend enlarging the traffic island where Canoe Hill and Laurel Roads meet, so as to avoid confusion about what path cars should take, and when.
Signs posted on the small island instruct motorists to stay to the right, and those coming from Laurel Road must yield. As it is, motorists traveling down (east, toward 123) Canoe Hill face the non-intuitive prospect of going around the traffic island, which sweeps cars slightly to the right (toward Laurel) in order to continue on that road, which then jogs left. The road also feels wide enough to motorists on that approach that it should accommodate two-way traffic on the left-hand side of the island.
The traffic island at Canoe Hill and Laurel Roads. Here we are looking from the Laurel Road side. Credit: Michael Dinan
“It’s just unnatural to go around it, the way it is,” Police Capt. John DiFederico said Tuesday at a meeting of the Traffic Calming Work Group.
“I think what is happening is a lot of people coming down Canoe Hill are not going around it, and then the people coming out of Laurel are expecting them to go around,” he added.
The Work Group fields requests for traffic calming and includes representatives from the police, public works and fire departments, as well as Jim Cole, a former police commissioner who now is a direct with the Board of Directors at the Community Emergency Response Team. This particular request came in from a motorist who rear-ended a car coming from Laurel that failed to obey the yield, then for some reason stopped short before pulling onto Canoe Hill, officials said.
Asked about whether a three-way yield—in other words, a “true roundabout”—would work at the intersection, Tiger Mann, assistant director of the Department of Public Works, said the up-and-down traffic from Canoe Hill likely needs to have the right of way.
“I think at present we can certainly enlarge the island then try to stripe it to the island,” Mann said.
Tom Lynn, who identified himself as a resident of that area of town for some 35 years, said people who live around there are accustomed to the intersection and approach it properly. He said that delivery trucks often are the vehicles that “cut corners.”
“That, to me, seems to be the danger,” Lynn said.
DiFederico supported Mann’s suggestion, saying making the circle larger “would stop people from wondering which way to go.”
The open question is whether it can be made larger while still allowing trucks traveling west on Canoe Hill to make what already is a tight left-hand turn onto Laurel, Mann said.
“We’d have to look at that and run some turning radii to see what to do,” Mann said.
Here’s the intersection we’re talking about:
I take this intersection everyday and have wondered why there is an island there at all. The island does NOT make the intersection safer in my view and a larger one would be a bad idea. The island changes what would be a nice wide turn for everyone into tight, narrow ones. Canoe Hill and Laurel is a three way intersection which are not rare – they are usually dealt with by adding one or two stop signs. Why not here?