So far, so goodon roundabout

Monday was the first day of school at Douglas High and the anticipated carnage at the roundabout never occurred.

There was some cars waiting to get through the traffic circle, but nothing like the kind of disaster many wags predicted.

Maybe it was because the high school kids are smarter than we give them credit for, or maybe it just isn't all that hard to navigate a roundabout. A four-way stop sign can be just as complicated, since there is always someone who doesn't yield to the right and someone else who isn't certain enough to pull out on time.

State officials who predicted that the roundabout will be accepted, once people use it for a while, were correct.

That still doesn't make it the right choice for the intersection at Highway 88 and County Road. It was one of many choices, some of which would have been far less expensive.

Will there be fewer rear-end accidents? Maybe, if people remember what a yield sign means.

The increased number of cars on the road in Douglas County will ensure there will be more accidents. Some of those will be at the roundabout and folks will point to them and say "See."

But the real difficulty is not with the engineering of the intersection, but with ourselves.

As long as we continue to find things to do while we're driving that distract us from the road, there will be accidents. And they have yet to invent the traffic device that will correct for the human factor.