Sunny Side Down

I get twitchy when our dear Sunny agrees with me. In this week's edition, she credits me for my comments that traffic signals are the obvious choice over a roundabout at Copps Avenue/Broadway. She then goes on to play whack-a-Chad because Chad didn't fold his tent and go home, but is pushing for the city to take another look at the roundabout option and get more data.

Background: The city is going to upgrade the Copps/Broadway intersection because of the increased traffic that will result from the two new clinics, the Menards expansion, and the eventual Whitehorse property development. The city administration said we would have the improvement done by the time the clinics opened and Meriter's clinic will be opening this fall.

Alder Speight (pronounced like "eight" NOT eighth") is asking us to look more closely at the total costs for each option. The total costs include societal economic costs, such as crash costs (property damage and injuries), wasted fuel, added pollution, and lost productivity from sitting at the traffic signals. On every measure, the total cost of traffic signals is higher, often much higher than the cost of a roundabout.

As I noted at the last council meeting (the scary one when I had the gavel), looking at total costs is not some wacky goofball idea. There is bloc of people who roll their eyes and close their minds whenever Chad says anything (OK, I know that he does tend to go on a bit, but that's because he's passionate about our city). We use net benefit analysis at my day job to help evaluate where to spend safety funds. Net benefit analysis is a very common practice in traffic engineering. The FHWA has a web page with links to various net benefit/cost models.  

The rub here is that these are external costs to the city, i.e. they do not come out of the city's budget.  They would not be imposed only on our residents, but on all users of that intersection. It makes complete sense to consider the external costs when using federal funds since those monies come from all of us (more or less) and thus should be spent in a way that benefits all of us.

Chad's persistence has caused me to take a second look. He and I requested that the city obtain these total costs from Vierbicher and they are working on it (at no added cost to the city). We shall see what the numbers say, but I fully expect the roundabout will be cheaper from the total cost standpoint. The analysis has to be tweaked to account for Copps/Broadway being a three-legged intersection in ways that will favor traffic signals (fewer T-bone crashes than you would expect at a 4-legged intersection), but I don't think that will change the total cost numbers.

The question then becomes whether we take money out of our own Monona pockets - and only our pockets - to cover these larger social/economic costs or not.

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Here is one more website that does nice job laying out the factors to be considered.