Aggie_Fire said:
It's most likely because it would be one big 'ol roundabout! Probably main reason is that signals were much more popular when it was removed. Now studies show that roundabouts are safer, but they do have their limits.
It was because traffic circles are terrible at high volumes. You can play around with this
roundabout simulator. It's easy when there's almost nobody there (even 320 vehicle/hour) but if you extrapolated to TxDOT's annual average vehicle count (20k per day in one direction if I'm
reading the maps right, twice that before COVID) multiply that by four to account for all directions (during normal non-summer hours it would have a higher average) you're looking at over 3000 vehicles per hour at the intersection, which means everyone will be slamming on their brakes at all times, from all directions, which is basically just a glorified four-way stop at that point...which not only will make it hard for drivers, hard for pedestrians, but it makes congestion in the area way worse because the "platoons" created by the other stoplights on University Drive get broken up.
