Roundabouts are increasingly popping up in Chicago's suburbs, seen as an answer to traffic problems

They've long been seen as an overseas oddity, roundly mocked on TV's "The Simpsons" and in the Chevy Chase comedy "National Lampoon's European Vacation." But roundabouts are increasingly popping up in parts of the Chicago suburbs.

Government planners say they're often a better way to handle traffic where streets converge and diverge.

For those too square to know what one is, roundabouts are “a circular intersection where drivers travel counterclockwise around a center island,” according to one definition that goes on to explain that drivers approaching one of the junctions “yield at entry to traffic” and “then enter the intersection and exit at their desired street.”

They’re often considered safer and more efficient than traditional intersections with stop signs or stoplights. That's if they're put in the right place with the right design, experts say.

One spot they’re not necessarily great: tight, congested areas, which is why the city of Chicago hasn't been keen on them.

“Typical Chicago street widths are not conducive to roundabout designs,” a City Hall official says.

It’s a different story, though, in the suburbs. The Illinois Department of Transportation’s district covering state routes in Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties now includes eight roundabouts on those roads. Eleven more are planned in the next three to five years, and another dozen are being discussed, officials say.

Downstate, in the IDOT district just west of the Chicago metro area, there are two roundabouts, and the state agency expects to put in another eight. Elsewhere downstate, another 15 are anticipated.

There are about 30 roundabouts statewide that IDOT had a hand in creating. The first apparently dates to 2005 east of St. Louis.

“Roundabouts offer safety, economic and efficiency benefits,” an IDOT spokeswoman says. “They increase safety by reducing conflict points, reduce carbon emissions and fuel consumption, are less expensive to operate and have a longer service life than traditional intersections with traffic signals.”

They aren’t necessarily cheaper, though. They can require more pavement, land and design elements, experts say.

In addition to those under IDOT's control, some Chicago-area county highway departments and municipalities have been involved in the planning and construction of roundabouts, sometimes in places where suburbia meets farmland.

“It was a bit of a test for us,” Jennifer O’Connell, chief of design for Kane County’s Division of Transportation, says of her agency’s first modern roundabout, built in 2016 at Route 47 and Burlington Road in conjunction with IDOT.

Some farmers and county maintenance staffers initially bristled at plans for that, saying they weren’t going to be able to move their large equipment — tractors and snowplows — through the circle.

But once the roundabout opened, “It was crickets, and not a single person called me,” O’Connell says. “Which, as an engineer, is good news.”

They’re “an excellent way to slow traffic down,” she says.

Illinois seems to have been slow to adopt roundabouts compared to nearby states, according to a crowd-sourced database overseen by engineering consultants Kittelson & Associates, Inc.

It shows Indiana has nearly 800 roundabouts and Wisconsin more than 600. They’re among the top 10 states in terms of roundabout construction, according to the database.

Illinois ranks 29th, with 149 roundabouts, though the tally also includes different types of circular traffic models such as “traffic calming circles” that tend to be smaller and in residential areas.

The Chicago Department of Transportation “has not constructed any modern roundabouts, and none are currently in the works or planned,” a spokesperson says.

There are numerous traffic circles in the city, though, usually built in consultation with local City Council members and not always liked by drivers.

“Their purpose is to get drivers’ attention, so they slow down to navigate the intersection,” according to the spokesperson, who says the agency doesn't keep count of traffic circles in the city.

Steve Schilke, an IDOT bureau chief of programming, says his agency is “looking at a couple of locations” for possible roundabouts in the city.

One possible location could be in a “lakefront park” in conjunction with a revamp of DuSable Lake Shore Drive, officials say.

The Cook County and DuPage County transportation departments say they haven't overseen roundabout construction but are open to the concept.

“While the Division of Transportation has no roundabouts planned, it does consider the potential for installing a roundabout in place of other traffic control every time an intersection improvement project is evaluated,” says Steve Travia, DuPage County's transportation director. “Notably, the areas surrounding most intersections on the DuPage County highway system are fairly well built-out or have protected forest preserves or other sensitive land impacts, which make converting these traditional intersections to roundabouts impractical in many cases.”

Cook County’s Department of Transportation and Highways “does not have any roundabouts in design, but the department is continuously looking for implementation candidates,” a spokeswoman says. “This intersection treatment is on the Federal Highway Administration’s list of proven safety countermeasures, with an approximately 80% reduction in fatal and injury crashes and should be evaluated as a potential intersection treatment where appropriate.”

The United States is still relatively new to adopting roundabouts, having been building them in earnest only since the early 2000s.

“It was probably our ignorance,” says Rahim Benekohal, director of the Traffic Operations Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We thought these things were not for us. Meanwhile, France and Australia had thousands."

For decades, government agencies in the United States were reluctant to build roundabouts because many experts considered them confusing and ineffective, according to Benekohal.

"Partly, I think they were influenced by 'The Simpsons,' " he says, referring to a 2003 episode in which the cartoon family visits London and becomes trapped in one for hours, driving endlessly round and round.

The joke perpetuated the confusion of roundabouts because it instead showed a large, multilane rotary — similar to Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C., and the one around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — and not a true roundabout, Benekohal says.

“They don't work. They're not the same,” he says.

Modern roundabouts, by comparison, are designed to slow traffic and soften the approach angle of vehicles.

And if there’s a crash, says Heidi Files, chief of planning and programming for Kane County's transportation division, it’s less likely to be severe because of a design that guards against T-bone or head-on collisions in large part thanks to a landscaped center island.

A spokesman for the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says of roundabouts: “Sometimes, they can lead to an increase in low-severity crashes initially, but research suggests this resolves over time.”

Roundabouts are fashioned as aesthetically pleasing gateways in some communities.

In Crystal Lake, a sculpture installation is planned for the center island of one of two roundabouts built in 2023, according to Mike Magnuson, the far northwest suburb's public works and engineering director.

Roundabouts also can ease the frustration that comes with sitting alone at a red light with no cross traffic in sight, says Kittelson senior engineer Andrew Thompson. “If nobody’s coming, you just go,” he says.

“They continue to be more and more popular,” Thompson says. “In some states, it’s a roundabout-first policy” — meaning that, if a new intersection is planned, “You have to prove why a roundabout is not the preferred” option.

Will County officials are planning to build its first roundabout in Crete Township. New Lenox completed two in 2025.

Lake County has been involved in building 11 and plans to start construction of three more this year.

Gurnee built a roundabout several years ago.

In Des Plaines, a modern roundabout was created a few years ago out of a nearly century-old traffic rotary circle, says Jason Salley, an IDOT geometric studies unit head.

Before the reconstruction, the spot at Wolf Road and Golf Road was notorious for traffic headaches and known by many as “Suicide Circle."

It's taken years for American traffic engineers to catch up to their European counterparts and learn how to design and build good roundabouts, according to Benekohal.

“It's not a fad that's going to go away,” he says.