Kevin,

welcome to home safely, a podcast from the National Center for rural road safety. Hi everyone. I'm Kevin Elliott. I'm your host on the podcast, and I'm the marketing manager for the National Center for rural road safety. Each episode on our podcast will bring you stories, strategies and solutions that are helping communities across the country make their roads safer for everyone, whether you're behind the wheel, designing the road, or just a community member, we're all working together out there to get everyone home safely. Enjoy the episode.

Okay, everybody, I am here today on the home safely podcast with Amanda Austin. She's an engineer, and she is a roundabout and alternative intersection design lead for the Texas Department of Transportation design division. The state is booming. They're doing lots of innovative work down there, and this episode is specifically about roundabouts. Amanda in her job there, has been working on projects to deploy roundabouts across the state of Texas. And like they do everything in Texas, everything is bigger in Texas. So when they got into roundabouts, they really got into roundabouts. We're very excited to have Amanda on the show to talk about how they did that, talk about the importance of roundabouts, why they chose to do this, where they're going, and how they do roundabouts in Texas. So Amanda, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here, and honestly, talking about roundabouts is one of my favorite parts of my job. So looking forward to it. Love that. So when I travel a lot for work and speak and talk to transportation audiences, I almost always will ask for a show of hands, and I'll say, hey, how many of you are veterans of the roundabout wars? Half the room will raise their hand. They know exactly what I'm saying, because roundabouts are proven to save lives. They're one of the most sure fire safety counter measures that there are, but they can be very hard to deploy. They're new. In lots of communities, people have never driven through them. They're unusual. And so sometimes communities fight about these things and they don't want a roundabout. But the good news is that usually, once they get them, they want them. So you are in the middle of deploying roundabouts in the state of Texas. So start at the beginning and tell us how you all decided to do this, and what was the problem you're trying to solve, and just give us the rundown, absolutely, absolutely. So we have a lot of roundabouts, but people don't realize that. I just did a account before we started here, we're at 661

roundabouts in our state, and of those 661 though only about 16 of them are on our state do T system, and so from a state perspective, from the D O T perspective, just three years ago, if anybody asked, you know, does Texas do roundabouts? They'd say no. TxDOT, Texas does not do roundabouts. And those 661, they're they're very concentrated in certain areas. The highest concentration is in the Fort Worth area. They're mostly in urban areas. And so you can live your whole life in a portion of Texas and never drive through a single roundabout. That's how big our state is. So even with 661

because they're concentrated, they are still relatively new. And up until, up until a few years ago, the the mindset was, Texas doesn't do these. I came to the state about six years ago, I came from Washington State, where I did a lot of roundabout work there early in my engineering career, and Washington was a little bit further along in their roundabout journey. You could say they really started kicking them off in the early 2000s

and so I had good experience there. And when I came to Texas, I started work in our Houston district, and I had an opportunity to work on schematic projects early in project development, and after a few years there, I started to realize, hey, we're not, we're not really doing roundabouts, and we don't really have resources for roundabouts at the state level. You know, they there was made mention of them in our design manual, but is very high level, not a lot of resources. And it just, it wasn't an option for people. We went traffic signals and stop signs. There were some roundabouts. El Paso proudly has a couple roundabouts. Bryan district has a couple roundabouts. So they were scattered here and there, but they were extremely unusual. And so I got the opportunity a couple years ago now to share some ideas about how we could implement more roundabouts. And the snowball effect started where these people started coming out of the woodworks, and specifically, I always got to shout out our administration, the highest levels of TxDOT, liked roundabouts, and I think we're just looking for an opportunity to to bring them aboard. And our paths crossed, and it worked out amazingly well. Our deputy executive director, Brandi Hendrickson comes from Indiana, and we know Carmel Indiana is the capital roundabout capital the United States with over 150

roundabouts in Carmel Indiana alone. It's a suburb of Indianapolis. And so brandy came to Texas with knowledge that roundabouts are a good and a safe option. And.

Then our other Deputy Executive Director, Brian Barth, actually comes from the Fort Worth area, so he'd driven them, he'd seen them, he'd seen them deployed in the Fort Worth area. So we had a roundabout Summit in May of 2023 with around 50 TxDOT folks from around the state, where we talked about roundabouts. We learned about them. We had speakers. We had FHWA come in Georgia. Do t came in, some consultant subject matter experts. And then we spent the afternoon brainstorming, how can we bring more roundabouts to Texas, to TxDOT specifically. And out of that came this program. We also had a task force. We had a one year Task Force. The first year of the program. I had a multi District Task Force that helped support what my program was doing. And that's kind of how it kicked off, was it was like this dynamic shift where roundabouts used to be the unusual part, where you'd see one here and one there, and then suddenly the dynamic did a flip flop, where now there's people in all these different districts. Oh, we can do roundabouts. We can think about roundabouts. And we've got a program now, and I'm in design division, and they dedicated resources for us, and with those resources, we're able to very quickly update our design manual. Well, I shouldn't say very quickly. I should say our design manual was already in the works to be updated, and I was able to jump in at just the right time. And, you know, between the program and the task force, we were able to accomplish a lot. In that first year, the task force has transitioned into what we call a community of practice on our teams network here for the second year. So the program has been around for a little over two years now, and we we defined vision, we defined mission, with the task force. And I tell you, one of the greatest things about this task force is that it wasn't just me or my team in design division at headquarters operating in a silo. You know, we were talking a little bit earlier, how Texas is. It's a very diverse state. It's a very big state. We were very decentralized. We have 25 districts, geographic districts, and with that, there's 20.5 different org charts. There's 25 different ways of doing things. And this task force, I believe we have 14 out of the 25 districts, so over half of them represented on this task force. And so that allowed, like, everything that we were proposing to do, that we were trying to do, we were getting really great feedback from a wide swath of districts. We had Metro, rural and urban. And so that task force, it gave us credibility, it gave us validity, and it gave us a good check on what we were doing, that it was going to actually be applicable. And I think between our administration support and the task force in that first year, that's what contributed to a very quick launch of roundabouts in Texas. I'd say we still have a long ways to go, because, you know, the planning process, we can start planning roundabouts now, but it's still going to be a few few years before we start seeing them on the ground. That's a fantastic story and rundown of that, and I want to, and by the way, I want to dwell on part of that, because with F, W, A, and the National Center for rural road safety and local road safety plans and the safe system approach, which is a great approach to solving roadway fatalities, one of the core tenants of that is a multi disciplinary, holistic, collaborative approach, because in agencies, generally, any group of humans, you end up with these little pockets or silos. We call them in a gigantic state like Texas, that is decentralized. And so for those of you who don't know what that means, it's that means, a centralized state versus a decentralized state is that there is a lot of autonomy in these districts. So Florida, where I live, is also decentralized. And there's seven big districts, and they all have their own secretaries and their own staff org charts, like Amanda said, their own budgets. And so getting them all on the same page is just hard these big, rangy states. I want to put an exclamation point on that, and then ask you a little follow up question on that task force, because I think that's a textbook example of what can happen when you do the work of putting together, bringing people in who might disagree with you. They're multi disciplinary, getting their thoughts. But then this thing really kicked off. So if you could tell me the story of that task force a little bit, how that how did you reach out to people? How did you get them to come on board, especially with something new and maybe controversial, like roundabouts? That's a great question. So we started the roundabout summit was kind of the start of that. And I was very fortunate. I was paired with a lady named Heather in our traffic safety division to set up this roundabout Summit. They wanted the two of us to work together. And I think I brought a lot of roundabout design experience and a lot of ideas for what we needed to do for roundabout design. Heather brought statewide experience in her role in traffic safety division. She had interacted with a lot of the districts, so whereas I at the time, was kind of sheltered in Houston district. She had met all these other districts, and she really helped connect me with a bunch of other districts. And so we got, I think it was around the same, maybe 15 or so districts represented the roundabout Summit. And so she just knew different people from her work. When we had the roundabout summit with all those different district folks, we were.

Deciding next steps and coming up with a dedicated program and then a task force to support that were recommendations from the summit. Now, it didn't end up being all the same people, I'd say maybe a third to half of the roundabout summit folks then agreed to be a part of the task force. The rest of the task force was either pinged by somebody on the summit like, Okay, I can't commit to this task force, but here's somebody else. Here's somebody else on my team that can when I came in under design division my leadership, they had their own contacts around the state, and so even though I was still getting to know people outside of Houston district, my leadership knew who might be some good districts and people to reach out to. And with that, we got an amazing cross section. It wasn't just 14 different districts. We had different levels of leadership. We had different departments. We also had some division folks. We have maintenance division, construction division. We had people who were involved in construction and maintenance. We had designers, we had young engineers. We had leadership. We had, you know, a TP and D. I realize that doesn't mean anything. Transportation program director, transportation planning director. It's a high level director. In each district, there's 25 TP and DS, and basically everything in the project funnel, from planning schematics, right of way, utilities, and then final design is under the TP and D and so to have a TP and d1, of the key decision makers, she provided a really unique perspective on decision making, and, you know, what we needed to push, what we needed to develop. And so it was, it was really great. But it came about mostly from, you know, people at our state level who just knew these different districts. That's great that, I mean, that's a that's a wonderful story. And something that is sometimes overlooked is like, Why won't people cooperate with us? Well, let's talk to the nitty gritty of that. How did you hold the meetings? Were they virtual? They'd have to be right, because Texas is so big, we set out the expectations right from the get go. When we asked people to volunteer, we said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to meet every other month for a year, and I'm going to do a beginning in the end. So it's going to be seven meetings over the course of the next year. It's gonna be two hours for each one, and they're going to be hybrid. They were in Austin. And so you know, if you are in and around or can commute to the Austin area, we encourage you to join us in person. I think at one point we only had four or five people there out of the whole task force of around 40 to 50 people. And other times we'd have 1215, people. Our last seventh one, I really encourage whoever could come. And a few people drove from our corner, districts like Atlanta, districts five, six hour drive or so, and they came down for it, which was exciting, but we did a hybrid setup. We knew in our headquarters which rooms were best for hybrid setups. Not all of them work really well. But one thing that was really cool about that too is we continued to have that high level administration support. My boss came to every single meeting his boss and boss's boss, they came as often as they could, and then those members of administration, the deputy executive directors, we saw them. Either they would call in, or they would pop in if they were in Austin, if they could. I think we had at least one of them on every call, if not several of them. And I think because it was only every other month and it was just two hours. People really committed to it. I'd say we probably got about three quarters attendance at each time, which, you know, with big groups like that. That's actually a pretty good stat. So, you know, we did have to set it up like that, but, but people did prioritize. I I'd send out a poll for everybody with available times, and they'd fill it out. And, of course, you never catch everybody. But I did have, I did have a few core people from districts that you know were were really participating a lot, that I would try to prioritize their time and just do your best each time to get as much of a cross section as you can. That's fantastic. Congratulations on that. Because, like I said, that that sounds like a pretty fully formed and very successful outreach campaign to build that team. I'll tell you what let me take. Let's take a little break here for a minute, and I'm with Amanda Austin. She's the roundabout and alternative intersection design lead at the Texas D O T design division, and we're going to come back here a little bit and talk more about roundabouts in Texas.

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Now back to our show.

Welcome back. Everybody. To home safely. Podcast. I am on with Amanda Austin. She's the roundabout and alternative intersection design lead for the Texas do T design division. We're talking about.

Roundabouts in Texas, and they are exploding all over the state. Amanda was telling us how they built their team, their interdisciplinary team, Task Force, to get these things out on the state system. But I want to back up a second and go to the very premise of this whole thing. In other words, why roundabouts in the first place? Why are they such a big deal? Why did you need to do this task force? Why was it such a need in Texas in the first place? Oh gosh, Kevin, I don't know how much time you have, but I mentioned the favorite part of my job is talking about roundabouts. And this is why they are amazing. On so many levels, we start with safety, we end with safety. They're the safest intersection option that we have, short of a complete grade separation, where you have, you know, no crossing conflicts, if you have anything at grade, roundabouts going to be the safest. They reduce fatalities by 90%

and they're applicable everywhere. I joke that I have my urban districts will point to their rural friends and say, I'll round about say they don't belong in these big cities. They belong out in these rural areas where there's these severe crashes and the rural district folks and not us. No roundabouts are a city thing. They don't belong out here and and actually, they belong everywhere. You know, when I mentioned we had 661

I believe across the state, we have about 900 innovative intersections, that includes all the other types of weird intersections that you may or may not have heard of, like restricted crossing U turns or median U turns or diverging diamonds. The majority of all those, all those other innovative intersection types, you know, two thirds of them are roundabouts, because they're applicable everywhere they can go on high speed rural corridors. They can go in downtown, urban areas. They can be scaled up and down. They can be multiple lane. They can be single lane. And with good design, that's where you get those amazing safety stats. And I usually pause when I talk about this with people. I want that to soak in a 90% reduction in fatalities compared to a traditional intersection. We don't have anything else in our toolbox that's so profound and we need it. A third of our fatal and serious injury crashes in Texas are at intersections. So we know we've got a problem, right? We've been doing traffic signals and stop signs for decades. Let's see in Texas, we had about 4000 fatalities on our roadways last year in 2024 alone, and if you think about a third of those at intersections, it's hundreds and hundreds of people every year. And intersections also have some of the most severe collisions, those T bone collisions, you actually have a better chance of surviving a head on collision than you do a T bone, oftentimes, because of speed. You know, you can't. You know, when you're hitting a T bone, you're hit on the side of your car, and you're lucky if you got a newer car with those side airbags, but that's not a lot to protect you compared to like the engine block. So intersection collisions, they tend to be severe. And you know, all it takes is somebody running a red light. There's nothing magical about a red light in the air that stops a vehicle. We have to trust everybody. We have to trust each other that we're going to do what we're supposed to do, what we're trained to do. And it doesn't always happen. Sometimes it can be an accident. Sometimes it can be impaired driving. It can be a lot of different things, road rage. It could be a disabled driver. Somebody suffers a medical condition, and they go through a red light. All it takes going through a red light at speed, and you can have a fatality. And roundabouts don't have that. They slow vehicles down, they reduce the conflict points, they take out the T bone collision entirely. And so the only types of collisions you get in modern roundabouts, and I'm not talking those high speed rotaries or your neighborhood little traffic circle where somebody dropped a tree in the road. I'm talking a modern roundabout. You're reducing speeds under 30 miles per hour, oftentimes under 25 miles an hour, and you're all going in the same direction around that center island. So if you do mess it up, and honestly, that's one of the biggest concerns I hear about roundabouts, is the drivers, but even they're forgiving, even for drivers, that's just safety. I could go on about the operational benefits, the resilience, that one's easy, the power goes out and they keep working, which I tell you, in Houston, where we get hurricanes, and in Florida, for you guys, that's a really big deal, just something that keeps working. When the power goes out, they're great for pedestrians and bicyclists when the time, when they're designed well, they can accommodate big trucks. That's a big one. You know, we're talking about rural roads here, and rural high speed roads with good, proper design. You can get those speeds down, and you can accommodate big trucks, even wind turbines. I've seen roundabouts that can accommodate the biggest loads on the road. They're just applicable everywhere I could go on and on. Kevin, that was one of the best rundowns of the benefits roundabouts I've ever heard in my life. That was fantastic. There you it was. You said so much in there. So okay, so I'm going to, I want to go through and unpack a few of those things. We're going to assume that by now our listeners are so hooked on roundabouts, they want to get nerdy about them. So we're going to get a little nerdier about this, because I think this is important, by the way, to explain why these things work so well. And.

Yeah, and you were talking to start with the typical four way intersection, right, whether it signalized, has lights, you know, signalized, or stop signs, whatever it happens to be, it's essentially most of them are, are two right angles come together at roughly right angles, and the worst possible angles you can have a car crash in are at 180 so head on and 90 like it like a T bone, what we call them. And the traditional four way stop intersection has something like 32 or there's a lot of those possible spot called conflict points. You mentioned that term conflict points where, where two vehicles can bang into each other at these highly deadly angles, and also at speed, roundabouts reduce the conflict points down to something like eight typically, you know, I said they reduce fatalities by 90% obviously, that's not 100 to give you an idea, our next best, innovative intersection, the restricted crossing U turn, where you essentially Take out some left and through movements at an intersection that reduces fatal and serious injury crashes around 60% so that gives you kind of an idea of where the next one's at. So 90% is really high. But of the 10% that still happen, it's true, it is possible that there are fatalities around about is almost primarily single vehicle incidents, and that's where it's typically somebody under the influence or speeding and or speeding, and they they hit these geometric obstacles. So the roundabout you want to get nerdy, right? Do it? When you approach a roundabout, you're typically going to start having an island on your left, like a curb on your left and your right, and that helps to slow you down. We call it the tunneling effect, as you get within a few 100 feet, and that island on your left is called left is called a splitter island. You're used to seeing those in more urban areas, but this splitter island and the outside curb is going to start routing you in a curve, a gentle curve, and that curve is to try to slow you down gently so you're going at speed, say you're on a rural, high speed approach in Texas that can be 70 miles an hour. Here we actually have a roundabout in one of our more rural areas recently installed that have 70 mile per hour speed limits approaching the roundabout. Okay, so you're coming in 70 plus miles an hour, and the road starts to curve. You've got some curbing on your left next to you, sometimes on your right, and it starts curving so you start gently slowing down. And then as you get closer to the roundabout, you get closer to entering. You're actually going to turn the other direction, so that you're going in the direction of that circulating traffic. Now, if you do all of that, you're going to be slowed down to a gentle speed, and you yield to the people that are already in the circle. Modern roundabouts, you always, always, always yield on entry. And once you're in the circle, you have the right of way. You're now at an angle with the other vehicle. That's that side swipe collision. So again, you know if, if you are approaching a roundabout and you drive straight through it, if you try to you're likely going to hit that splitter island. You might hit some outside curbing before you even get to that center island. And so there's geometric features in the way to slow you down. And I mentioned earlier, there's nothing magical about a red light that stops you, and there really isn't, especially, I mean, I've been on a Texas 70 mile per hour roadway at night in the fog, and let me tell you that red light is not very visible, but a roundabout suddenly you've got curbs on either side of you. You've got a reflective sign that warns you there's a roundabout coming up ahead, and you have to slow down because the road ahead of you is turning and then often that center island in the middle as well. We encourage people to add some sort of mounding to it, some sort of vertical feature. There's a hot debate in the roundabout community on whether you put hard structures or sculptures there that could become something you could crash into, or whether you don't. But I think everybody has agreed that some sort of vertical target. It's called target value, so that as you're approaching the roundabout, it's something in your way. You know, it's not just one tiny red.in the fog at night. There's this mound, there's something looming in the distance, in the middle of the road. And so you're just instinctively, you're going to let off the gas. You can say, what is that? You know, and poor visibility, obviously, in rural roads, we encourage illumination if possible. I mean, I think that's one of the first steps with any rural intersection, if you're having trouble, is to get some lights out there, warning lights and street lights, but it's the same with roundabouts. The more illumination, the better people can see it. But even if it's so rural, you can't afford that, or can't do that, having that curbing as you approach and having that center island with that target value is just naturally going to catch people's attention and help them to slow down. So it's why we drive slower in a neighborhood with trees by the sidewalk, right? We just it's telling us to slow down. One of the relatively common critiques of roundabouts, or the idea is, oh well, it's going to make traffic worse than the intersection, right? Cars are going to back up. We're not gonna be able to get get as many people through the intersection as we would before. And so, yeah.

Okay, fine. We're going to make things safer, but we're it's going to add to our commute. It's going to be congestion. So what is, what do you say to those that kind of thinking with with typical roundabouts? You know, there's a really great roundabout corridor that just went in a couple years ago outside of Houston. Here it's in Fort Bend County for any nerds out there, I recommend you look up the Texas heritage Parkway to Fort Bend County Road. It's got nine roundabouts on it, brand new, round about corridor. Lot of housing going in there, and the housing developers got together with the county, did a public private partnership to build this new Parkway and purposely put nine roundabouts in. And there's some debate about it, because it's a it's a connection between two state routes. Interstate 10 is on the north, and one of our major state highways, we call them FM Roads, or farm to market roads. FM 1093, is on the south. So it's a connection. It's a north south connection. And there's some debate that with nine roundabouts at every single roundabout, I have to slow down. It's a 45 mile per hour road, and nine times on this one stretch, I have to slow down to 20 miles an hour to get through this roundabout. And the answer is yes. But here's the thing, if that was all traffic lights, what are the chances you're going to hit nine green lights? Slim to none, right? All it takes is one of those red lights, and you've lost all of that time, right? You can be going 4550, miles an hour on a corridor, you get one red light. You sit through one cycle of that red light you've lost all the time that you've gained. So it actually provides smoother traffic flow than the stop and start that you get from signals. Signals purposely platoon vehicles up. And so you come to a stop, and you wait, it turns green, you all start back up again. That takes time. With a roundabout, they're inherently more efficient because you yield on entry. You don't have to stop.

You know you have to as soon as it's there's an opening you can go in, you don't have to stop. So that intersection space is always being used, and this might drive you nuts, but the next time you're sitting at a red light and nobody's using the intersection space because the other legs on green and they've all flushed out because that intersection space is always being used. It's just more efficient. You're not waiting at a red light in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night, if there's an opening you can go.

Typically speaking, roundabouts actually improve operations. So travel speed through a corridor, if you look at a corridor as a whole, will actually go up because you don't have that signal time that you're waiting for. There is an upper limit in the traffic industry. We look at about 50,000 vehicles a day. Is kind of an upper limit where a roundabout might start to break down. But that's really dependent if you can add some right turn lanes that are dedicated right turn lanes, oftentimes you can add to that a little bit. But, yeah, there's a point where just sheer volume, a two lane roundabout can't handle it. But that's that's really high volumes. I I challenge you. I imagine that about 90% of your commute every day, to and from work in the store is is intersections are less than that. There are so many roads that fall under that threshold. So I'm gonna take another break and then come back and nerd out some more about roundabouts. I want to ask Amanda about their flexibility and also how they accommodate unconventional vehicles, because that's also a big concern with a lot of people. So we'll be right back with Amanda Austin from the Texas DoD design division.

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Okay, I'm here on home safely with Amanda Austin. She's the roundabout and alternative intersection design lead for the Texas D O T design division, and we are. We're a couple of roundabout nerds today talking about the why they're so great, all the different aspects of them that make them a superior intersection design when it comes to safety, how they, in many times, in many times, improve throughput through corridors, and how Texas, specifically, on their state highway system or their state roadway system, are installing them like crazy, hundreds of them and more, all the time. So we were talking about the particulars of a roundabout, like how it reduces conflict points and changes collision angle and slows speed down, and all the different design elements that.

Make them that make them great. Amanda, one thing too, that a lot of people are concerned about when they see their first round about, and understandably so, is like, Hey, can you get a fire truck through there, like that? You know, because my house is on fire, obviously I need the big vehicles, farm equipment, EMS, type things. And so I know that's a that's a main, major concern, and especially in big states with lots of agriculture, will it slow down? Will it mess up our freight routes? And to that, you say

that's if you can have a niche within a niche, accommodating heavy vehicles through roundabouts is one of my favorite things

early in my career, when I was focused on roundabout design up in Washington State, we started looking specifically at oversized, overweight trucks, and I got the opportunity to go out and measure in the field some really weird and big trucks, and go on a ride along and with a low boy and really get a feel for what these vehicles need. And the company that I worked for at the time, they had done some mock roundabouts, where they out in the field, put together a roundabout that was full size, the true size, and invited farmers and local truck drivers to come drive through this roundabout that was built to scale with, you know, sandbags and traffic cones, And that helped them understand how these vehicles turned, how they maneuvered, and to design the roundabouts to accommodate them. So there's a couple elements that are really important in a roundabout design to accommodate these big vehicles, and that's everything from a fire truck to a moving box truck. In Texas, we hear a lot about, what about my horse trailer truck and horse trailer, trunk, truck and RV, but it's all the way up to, you know, the biggest semis on the road, and then the permit loads, low boys carrying, you know, a bulldozer to a construction site, or I mentioned earlier, wind turbines. You know, those are the biggest. Those are unusual, and they are the biggest. But the features that you need in a roundabout is you're going to need what we call truck aprons. And you've you may have driven through roundabouts and not even noticed that they were there, and we've actually found that we need to do some more outreach to the freight community, because there's quite a few truck drivers that don't know that the truck apron is for them. And what the truck apron is is, it is a patch of colored, usually colored and stamped concrete behind the regular travel lanes with a rolled gentle curb up to it, and so you want some sort of a rolled curb, typically at least two, if not three inches, sometimes four. But three is a sweet spot, and a three inch curb is going to deter most travelers, even if you got that big lifted truck. You don't want to hit a three inch curve at even 20 or 25 miles an hour. It's going to be uncomfortable, and so it's still low enough that the back of a truck can track over it. So you've probably seen a semi making a right turn, and they need that extra space. Well, it's the same thing in a roundabout. You know these things, we don't want them to be huge. It's a really delicate balance, because you want to get it as small as possible to lower the speeds and make it as safe as possible, while also accommodating the trucks that you need. And so there's this sweet spot in design where you get geometry just right to get your entering speeds down, but you have it big enough to accommodate your fire trucks, your semi busses, city busses, school busses. You know, what's interesting about fire trucks and busses is that they have a longer wheelbase, so they turn differently than a semi. For instance, a semi is typically going to track over that truck apron, but we don't want busses to track over the truck apron, because it's not very comfortable for the passengers, and so you design your roundabout to accommodate that. With fire trucks, the truck apron can actually have a dual purpose. One of our goals with education is to get better drivers, but one of the concerns we hear, and one of the concerns we hear from citizens and EMS alike, is that not only do people not know how to drive them, but if we've got our sirens and lights on behind you and you're approaching a roundabout, people are going to pay people are going to panic, they're going to freeze up, and they're going to block the whole roundabout. Well, it's possible. We do try to teach drivers to clear an intersection before they pull over. You know, you do the same in a traffic light. Don't stop in the middle of an intersection if you've got a fire truck behind you. But should they do the worst? The truck apron actually provides extra pavement space for an emergency vehicle to get around a car that stopped. So these truck aprons are typically around the center island. Like I said, sometimes they're stamped or colored concrete. They usually have some sort of a differentiation between the main roads. So you know, not to drive on them. But it comes down to good design. And I encourage designers across my state, we actually have some special resources for trucks and designing for these heavy vehicles to make sure that they do it right. I have seen a roundabout that was so small a fire truck got stuck in it. It wasn't done properly. And, you know, a roundabout like that can set a community back for years because, you know, now they've seen a bad example, and they think all roundabouts.

Are bad, but those are rare. Most modern roundabouts are designed to accommodate even bigger than fire trucks, and so fire trucks can get through very well. You just have to do your due diligence and understanding what vehicles you have out there and designing to accommodate them. Well. Amanda, this. This has been great. This is, I think it turning into a really good case study for others,

how to work in a big, diverse state with lots of autonomy in the districts, and to bring in a new concept, new or, you know, new for Texas roundabouts, something that can be controversial. How to build a multi disciplinary team, how to build champions around it, how to get funding for it, how to how to get them deployed like it has all of the, all of the hallmarks of how you start from very, very little and grow it into a a

large and growing program. We said 661

roundabouts or something like that in the state now and increasing so. So kudos to you and everybody that's worked there in Texas. That's a super inspiring story and so, and I know our listeners are going to love to hear about this. And so I encourage people to share this. Listen if you if your state is smaller than Texas, and it is, unless you're California,

if they can do it over there, you guys could probably do it in your state. To look to this interview for some really good tips and inspiration. So anything else about roundabouts or your experience, or the state of Texas, or anything I have not asked you about, that you think is important for listeners to know? I'd share a couple things. One thing that we're doing is we're trying to hit all fronts at the same time. It's a little aggressive, but you know, we've seen other states or other jurisdictions kind of go about it more organically, you know, add around about here, add around about there, see what happens.

We built a strategic plan. Our task force that was one of their tasks in that first year was to do a strategic plan. And we have four goals, communication, education, implementation and tracking, and so everything we're doing is falling under those categories, but we're trying to hit them all at once for communication, this sort of thing, you know, podcasts, presentations, social media, blast during roundabouts week,

creating flyers, a website, videos, doing everything we can to Get the word out there, and the word is to both engineers and city and county and other states, but it's also the drivers. It's to drivers is to our freight community. We have targeted outreach that we're working on. We want to reach out to our EMS, our fire departments, our police departments. We want to reach out to the freight community, like I mentioned, even railroad where railroad crossings come close to roundabouts. We're having conversations with railroads about that. We want to start talking with schools, you know, targeted outreach and communication, then education and education. It's a lot of internal we have to educate our engineers how to how to design these properly. We have to educate our consultants that are working with us, and we have to educate our local agencies. This is why we're doing these. Honestly, we've got some local, quite a few local agencies here in Texas, who've, they've been leading the charge on roundabouts. You know, I mentioned of those, 661, you know, we're doing more on the state route system, but it's been mostly local agencies so far. So they're a lot of them are leading the charge, but there's a lot that that are still where, and we've got to help educate them. And then implementation is providing tools to our districts and our local agencies to make these happen, looking at funding opportunities, funding partnerships, make sure that we have the appropriate design details for people to work with. And the last is tracking. You got to know better to do better. So looking back at what's working, what's not working, and keeping track of all that, it's really important. So

the other thing I would mention with approach is a member of my team, Mark lenners, coined this. I think top down, inside out, is what he says, and it's a really good way to think of it where, if you start with the top, is championing this, and then it works down from there in an organization like TxDOT, so it's trickling down, right? Our administration said this is a priority, and is trickling down now from within our organization is starting to go from the inside, and it's starting to go out. It's starting to go out to local agencies. The same thing can happen in a local agency. If your leadership can embrace this work its way down through your organization, then it's going to make its way out to the public. We've got a lot of work to do. We still face a lot of the public that just don't like roundabouts. I would encourage those listening here if you know maybe you're still not quite a fan of roundabouts. What I like to people, tell people is, I may not convince you to like them, but you're going to get home at the end of the day. What a great way to end this episode of home safely. Amanda Austin, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for being such a champion and such an expert on this, this proven safety countermeasure, it's proven to save lives, and so we really appreciate you spreading the word with such.

Articulation and expertise. Thanks for being on thanks for having me, Kevin, this has been awesome. See you all next time on home safely.

Thanks for riding along with us. On home safely. If you liked this episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who care about making rural roads safer for more resources, training or upcoming events, visit us@ruralsafetycenter.org

and until next time, stay safe. Stay connected, and let's all get home safely. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai