As a driver, I enjoy riding the roundabouts. They’re easy to approach and enter, and you can often clear through them quickly. Ira Needles Boulevard has six roundabouts between Keats Way and Conestoga Parkway, and it’s faster for me to take that road than Fischer Hallman with its traffic lights.

The swings through the roundabouts also make for a roller-coaster-like ride that my kids enjoy.

The Region of Waterloo has embraced roundabouts. No other city in Ontario has installed so many so soon. Regional planners promise that roundabouts move traffic more efficiently than four-way stops, and are safer than normal intersections. I can’t dispute these claims.

But speaking as a pedestrian, I am less sure of the effects roundabouts have on the health of our urban environment. Other residents have expressed concerns about safety. In spite of the fact that you are supposed to yield to pedestrians, the fact that cars yield rather than stop at roundabouts is an incentive to just breeze through. The first big test of pedestrian safety for roundabouts has come now that the Homer Watson/Block Line roundabout has opened, with St. Mary’s students crossing it to get to and from school.

But over and above the concern of safety, I wonder about the roundabouts’ contribution to urban sprawl. The traffic circles can take up a lot of land, and the island in the middle is wasted space unless it is used for a floral or art installation of some kind.

Moreover, the roundabouts we’ve built so far have tended to be single-purpose traffic sewers. The one case where buildings can be found near a roundabout (Erb and Ira Needles), these buildings seem to want to turn their backs on the space. More than the debate over how safe these roundabouts are for pedestrians to cross, there’s very little reason for the pedestrians to want to be there in the first place.

Intersections are meeting places, centres of the community. They have been so for centuries. We tell our friends to meet up at King and Victoria, or by the Second Cup at Phillip and University. In many cases, the surrounding buildings arrange themselves according to the corners. There is life on the streets leading up to them. Some intersections are better than others, but populated streets are safer streets, economically healthy streets, and they strengthen the economy of the city around them.

The roundabouts that the Region has installed do not have this aesthetic. When this happens, they become environments that make pedestrians uncomfortable, and make them want to hurry through. That hurts the life of a vibrant city.

The Region of Waterloo is set to add more roundabouts in the coming months, both on newly developed streets, and also retrofitting older intersections. While care has been taken to ensure these roundabouts are safe and efficient for drivers, more care should be taken to ensure that these roundabouts are safe and beneficial for the neighbourhoods they serve. They should be considered streets in their own right; nearby buildings should address these circles, and every attempt should be made to ensure that pedestrians not only are safe, but feel safe, when they visit.

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James Bow is a writer and father of two in Kitchener.
You can read more about him at http://bowjamesbow.ca/