Pershing Boulevard roundabout gets new striping, arrows

CHEYENNE – The roundabout at Pershing Boulevard, 19th Street and Converse Avenue recently received a facelift, courtesy of the city’s Public Works Department.

Late last week and during the weekend, crews worked to restripe both lanes of the roundabout, adding new markings on all four approaches that are designed to reduce the number of accidents there.

“There’s two major types of crashes we’re seeing,” said assistant city engineer Nathan Beauheim.

“One of them is people not yielding as they enter. The other is lane changing and exiting from the wrong lane, cutting people off, kind of this whole mix of improper lane usage. So the arrow changes and making the lane markings bolder is intended to help with the lane-changing problem.”

The Pershing roundabout has fulfilled its primary goal of reducing the number of serious crashes at that intersection, city officials say. Within months after it opened at the end of 2013, Cheyenne Police were already seeing a sharp decline from the 15 to 20 injury accidents that had been occurring there each year.

Conversely, confusion over just how to navigate the roundabout has led to an increase in accidents overall, according to police records.

“Injury accidents there, I know, are a lot lower than they were before,” said Cheyenne Police Department spokesman Dan Long.

“But in 2014, there were 61 crashes at the roundabout. In 2015, there were 88, and so far this year there have been 36.”

Long said those numbers only include “reportable” accidents, or those that are forwarded on to the Wyoming Department of Transportation. Long said minor fender-benders valued at less than $1,000 in damage are not reported to WYDOT, though CPD does keep track of them independently. Long said they make up only a small proportion of the total count.

“At one time in 2015, I did check the ‘nonreportable’ accidents at the Pershing roundabout, and it was an additional 10 or 12,” Long said.

In addition to doubling the width of the roundabout’s lane striping from four inches to eight, Beauheim said Public Works also removed “fish hook” road symbols in the left lane approaches to the roundabout, replacing them with straight/left-turn arrows instead.

The “fish hook” symbol is so named because it resembles a fish hook in its attempt to explain how left-lane motorists can use the roundabout to either go straight or circle three-quarters of the way around to make a left turn. But Beauheim said the unusual symbol may not have made sense to many motorists who hadn’t seen it before, hence its replacement.

“The professional consensus nationwide is heading toward that the fish hooks are confusing to at least some drivers and that standard arrows have better recognition from drivers as to what they mean,” Beauheim said.

He also dismissed the idea that motorists might misinterpret the left-turn arrow as meaning a vehicle could actually make a left turn into the roundabout, which would go against the traffic flow.

“We’ve got some other signs once you get up to the roundabout, one-ways and directional arrows to try to remind everyone they need to circulate counterclockwise,” Beauheim said. “The hope is we’ll get people to line up in the correct lane to begin with, so they don’t have to do these last minute jumps out.”

And the facelift isn’t complete yet, either. In the next couple of weeks, Beauheim said crews will paint large “yield” indicators at each roundabout entrance to further enforce the need for motorists to wait until the coast is clear before they enter the intersection.