There are few dispassionate opinions of roundabouts. It's kind of like how people love or hate the English prog rock band Yes, which has a song named "Roundabout."
No matter how you feel about either, the county recently said there will be a roundabout at Pope High School by the time students come back for the next school year.
The four-month construction project to replace the existing traffic signal at Hembree Road and Meadow Drive began in summer 2016, according to a Cobb County Department of Transportation fact sheet.
Cobb DOT posted a nine-minute video explaining the Pope roundabout on its Facebook page.
“The new roundabout at Meadow Drive and Pope High School differs from a typical, one-lane roundabout in having separate right-turn lanes for traffic entering and exiting the school,” the narrator explains.
Coming off of Meadow, there’s a split where drivers can choose to head toward the school’s softball field or the student pick-up and drop-off spot.
Three entrances to the student parking lot will be removed in hopes of streamlining roundabout traffic. There will now be two entrances and exits to the parking lot.
All buses will also use the roundabout to get into school, according to the video.
The roundabout also shakes things up for pedestrians, adding a new crosswalk and removing one on Hembree at Liberty Ridge Trail.
Pedestrians will go to a “refuge island” between lanes where they only need to look one way to cross.
Roundabouts became all the rage in traffic calming in Georgia a couple of years ago.
In the decade after 2005, more than 145 roundabouts were built throughout the state.
Although advocates say they are easier and safer than intersections, some find them all confusing and British like the band, Yes.
The project, which spans about 900 feet of Hembree, came from "safety and operational concerns voiced by the Cobb County School District and citizens" along with input from transportation officials," according to Cobb DOT.
This project was included as part of Cobb DOT’s Special Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) programs approved in 2005 and 2011. Cobb schools funding comes from SPLOST IV.
Read more: You might be wrong about roundabouts
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