The City Is Giving Us the Roundabout.

Mlive reported last week that the City of Grand Rapids is planning to repave Monroe and rework it to include four (4) roundabouts and a cycle track between Leonard and North Park.

Four roundabouts!  That's a lot of roundabouts.  Personally, I'm ambivalent about the cycle track.  I support cycling and other more sustainable methods of transportation and understand that these new cycle tracks may be safer for cyclists, but that whole stretch is already paved for cycling in Riverside Park and isn't in any way congested most of the time.  And how many commuting cyclists are there in Grand Rapids?  I'm not sure about this "If you build it, they will come" approach of the city's.  I'd prefer there to be significant demand before throwing money at a project like this.

As it is, installing these four new roundabouts more or less assures that some of Monroe's traffic will reroute to Coit - an outcome I am personally against as I live on Coit.  Some years ago, they added four-way yield circles up and down Oakwood which re-routed some significant traffic to Coit.  It looks like if you want to go North/South in Creston, you'll have to use either Coit or Plainfield after this change, and Coit is in desperate need of repair in many spots already.  The city did an overhaul of the road from Ann to Sweet this year to match the repair/sewer updating they did last year in Creston, but that's not the most trafficked part of Coit.  If it pushes all the additional traffic from Monroe, I'm going to have to save up for more car repairs.