Poor traffic circle

My respect and admiration to Alice Moon (Nov. 25) for engaging her neighborhood council and city engineering to take action at the corner where her husband was struck down by a car. I would echo her sentiment that I am also “disappointed the engineers created a less-aggressive traffic circle than [I] expected.”

My neighborhood council will be looking at traffic calming and since I’d heard about this project I had to see it for myself. I’m generally favorable toward traffic circles, and I expected to use this one as an example. So a couple Sundays ago, we took a ride over to Lyons Avenue and Cincinnati Street to check it out for ourselves.

First, we noticed was how tiny it is. If it weren’t for the paving-brick pattern against the asphalt you’d hardly notice it was there. Driving through, I barely had to reduce speed or move my steering wheel. Later, I paced it off at 14 feet in diameter with a softly rolled curb around the circumference. As I crossed the intersection returning to my car, a pickup truck sped by behind me at 35-40 mph.

I can’t recommend wasting further traffic-calming funds on ineffectual examples like this one.

Brooke Plastino

Spokane