It’s 2025. Why Can’t Americans Use a Simple Roundabout?

I’m a bit of an infrastructure geek. As a car enthusiast, I feel like it comes with the territory. After all, what good is a fast car if you have no good pavement to run it on? There’s no denying the natural overlap between the two subjects, and they tend to collide (forgive me) most spectacularly over the topic of traffic accidents. Have you ever had a social media post deleted because you were too mean to an intersection? I have. That’s how I learned such a thing was possible. Choose your hills carefully, folks; you only get to die on them once.

But that same forum was also how I learned of an annual report on the most dangerous intersections in Michigan, and now it’s something I look forward to every year (Seriously, guys, what took so long?). It’s a simple throwaway listicle produced by Michigan Auto Law, which is a chain of local law offices that specialize in (you guessed it) car and truck accidents. It’s mostly designed to drum up business, but the data come directly from the Michigan State Police’s accident database and their methodology is spelled out pretty cleanly, so I won’t waste space regurgitating it here. If anything, I might direct you to ClickOnDetroit, whose matter-of-fact repetition of the phrase “This is a roundabout” struck me as (unintentionally, I’m certain) funny.

Here’s the bottom line: of the 20 intersections with the most total collisions, five were roundabouts. They comprise three of the top ten—coming in at #2, #3 and #6—in a state where roundabouts represent a low-single-digit percentage of intersections. Bear in mind, the most recent list is based on 2024 data, so any intersection redesigns from this year won’t be reflected here.

The first roundabout on the list deserves the hate, if you ask me. This is 18 1/2 Mile Road at the beginning of the Van Dyke Freeway in Macomb County. Even without the data, I’m pretty confident I know where folks are getting jammed up. The southeast quadrant of this roundabout is a hot mess. Traffic coming from the west has to cross over traffic exiting the freeway to get to the eastbound onramp, creating the same sort of bottleneck you typically find in the weave lanes of a cloverleaf interchange. Throw in the north- and southbound through traffic and the roundabout element and you’ve got a recipe for a good, old-fashioned clusterf-. I’m sure this flows better than whatever it replaced, but I certainly wouldn’t call it good.

The second entry in the list, however, is where I lose all faith in humanity.

This is Pontiac Trail at Martin Parkway, just a few miles north of me. It effectively marks the northern limit of M-5 as a divided freeway. I use this roundabout frequently and have never once been held up by an accident (or felt like I might be involved in one myself). The “turbo” style slip lanes for traffic headed southbound on M-5 and eastbound on Pontiac Trail are both protected from conflicting traffic. Some of the lanes can be used as both through and exit lanes, which increases the chances of somebody cutting across another car’s bow, but other than that, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about it. Yet, somehow, this is the third-most-dangerous intersection in the state, averaging one crash every 2-1/2 days.

Going down the list, we find the intersection of 14 Mile and Orchard Lake Roads in Farmington Hills, which looks gnarlier in a satellite picture than it is in real life, followed by our first entry outside the immediate Detroit metro area: West Ellsworth and State in Ann Arbor. This one is almost comically simple, folks. MDOT put in so many curbs that it’s virtually impossible to end up in the wrong lane.

The situation at Lee Road and US-23 near Brighton is a bit of a head-scratcher from above, but it’s a fairly common sight in that part of the state. The engineers were trying to work an overpass, service drive connection and highway interchange into a space which, at best, probably had space for one of those three elements. The “barbell” style double-roundabout interchange has become a popular solution along this freeway, and while adding a third to mix makes for an awkward layout, that by itself isn’t an uncommon variation in that neck of the woods. The fact that traffic on the eastern side of the interchange is entering and exiting a busy shopping center likely doesn’t help matters, but none of this really adds all that much complexity to the interchange itself.

Since it wasn’t a roundabout, I felt like giving the #1 most dangerous intersection in the state its own special call-out. That honor goes to… whatever this is in Warren/Center Line. This interchange serves I-696, Van Dyke Ave (miles south of where it becomes a freeway above) and 11 Mile Road, which runs parallel to (and on either side of) the interstate, acting as a service drive. It also indirectly serves Mound Road (a freeway in and of itself), which intersects with 11 Mile just west of this image in one of the single most godawful interchanges known to man. I learned about this intersection the first (and last) time I took the wrong way home from GM’s Tech Center. There was about 10 inches of snow on the ground at the time too. Never again.

If you look beyond the basic share of crashes, the data also suggest some upsides. Roundabouts may stump drivers into crashing more often, but the resulting collisions aren’t typically as severe, sending occupants to the hospital less frequently. Of the three fatalities listed in the report, not one was recorded at a roundabout. Hey, small victories, right?

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