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Comment by buffaloPizzaBoy | Hacker News Reader

Whats not mentioned in the article is that this particular intersection has a

(15mph residential access road - top right) (25 mph farmland road - bottom) (50mph country highway - left and right)

Previously, only drivers from the 15mph and 25mph roads had to stop!

Visibility coming from the south would also be terrible to check for incoming highway drivers (left is blocked by foliage, right the road curves out of sight), so getting the highway drivers to slow down is a welcome improvement here.

There is also not enough space to add at the intersection here either, its seemingly bordered entirely by private land.

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> Previously, only drivers from the 15mph and 25mph roads had to stop!

This is something which drives me crazy with a decent number of roundabouts that the Wisconsin DOT constructs. You have a rural intersection where a local road crosses a major highway, and the local road has a stop sign in either direction. Then the DOT slaps a roundabout in there, greatly inhibiting the highway traffic which is 95% of the traffic going through that intersection. That is not a good use case for a roundabout! But for some reason they insist on doing them anyway. It's terrible road design.

Fast traffic on rural roads can be a major cause of accidents. The roundabouts slow everyone down and keep them slightly more alert.

(Not sure if this is the reasoning Wisconsin would use though.)

I've watched the YouTube video where the previous intersection was shown in pure horror. They probably killed people daily there.

They can eminent domain whatever land they need to expand the intersection.

The area borders wetlands and a very steep hillside where one of the roads intersects. And the regular flow of traffic pre-roundabout was more like 60-65 mph.

A roundabout was the correct choice.

I'm not arguing about whether the roundabout was the correct choice. However, the department of transportation can eminent domain whatever they want. And neither hillsides nor wetlands are insurmountable for modern civil engineering.

Wetlands are highly protected. Hillside (which a road currently resides on) is expensive to “fix”.

Eminent domain is not taking the land for free. They mentioned budget as a key reason for the space constraints.

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