Editor’s note: The following column takes place sometime in the distant future.
Not long ago, one of my great-great-grandchildren asked me, as the last remaining local who was alive at the time, how people reacted to the construction of Great Barrington’s first traffic roundabout in 2022. And while my blessed life of 105 years, and counting, has been filled with many otherwise memorable things that I’ve since forgotten, there was never a chance I wouldn’t remember every detail of The Great Roundabout War of 2022 to 2024. And that is not just because the story was memorialized in prolific local historian Bernard Drew’s six-volume, 1,700-page, detail-rich epic, “Rage and Roundabouts: The Battle of Routes 7, 23, and 41,” which became a popular film starring Tom Cruise and that featured Drew in a legendary, scene-stealing cameo filmed at Mason Library.
Indeed, when his reference-librarian character uttered his single line of dialogue with pitch-perfect sarcasm, “Have you tried searching the microfiche?” it instantly became a popular catch-phrase hurled at anyone too damn lazy to look something up themselves.
It was a sign of the opinionated times that construction was still incomplete when, in June 2022, people began to loudly sound off on social media to complain about signage, predict roadway carnage, and engage in increasingly heated debates about urgent matters like whether it should be called a roundabout, rotary, or traffic circle.
In a troubled age when people were breathlessly choosing largely irrelevant hills to proverbially die on, something about the roundabout debate took the similarly proverbial cake.
First developed in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, the roundabout has long been popular across Europe. Over time, roundabouts have increasingly been instituted throughout the United States.
Numerous studies have found that roundabouts reduce injury-causing traffic accidents by as much as 80 percent and all accidents by nearly half. They are a simple and effective means of “traffic calming,” which is a nerdy, traffic-engineer phrase that conjures an image of a quiet meditation room where agitated traffic can pull over for a few minutes of deep breathing of lavender-scented air. However, the term means a road design that reduces speed and smooths traffic flow.
The Great Barrington project germinated back in 2013 with the filing of a Massachusetts Department of Transportation Project Initiation Form which kicked off a close examination of our problematic intersection.
By 2018 MassDOT hired a design contractor for what would become a $2 million state-funded highway project. When a required public hearing was held that year by representatives from MassDOT, residents lined up at the microphone to tell assorted engineers and transportation experts that they had no idea what they were doing.
What could they possibly have learned during years of study to acquire advanced degrees in highway engineering and traffic management and urban planning, or by spending years implementing countless highway projects, that the average Great Barringtonite could not learn at least as well by, say, not getting an engineering degree and never developing first-hand experience implementing complex roadway projects?
In retrospect, that 2018 hearing made clear that war was inevitable. Despite a compelling presentation, including an animated visualization of the proposed roundabout that detailed high speeds, problems with traffic signals, a high crash rate, deeply compromised pavement, serious risks to pedestrians, no accommodation for bicycles, and problems with ADA compliance that endangered the elderly and disabled, locals were unmoved.
“Unneeded!” some said. “Waste of money!” others yelled. “What the hell do you know, anyway? You don’t even live here!” suggested a few more residents.
Some residents were legitimately wary given turbulence from a recent downtown-reconstruction project, but most just seemed opposed to any change, period. As the saying goes, “Change is not just a river in Egypt.” Or something like that. I can’t quite remember. C’mon, man, I’m 105!
Once construction began, opponents produced Youtube videos to advance conspiracy theories suggesting MassDOT was staffed entirely by deep-state agents of Big Pavement and Big Construction and Big Traffic Circles who had spent their lives not learning engineering and urban planning and traffic management but, instead, represented an evil cabal that lived only to crush the scrappy, local, mom-and-pop businesses that had been manufacturing traffic lights and stop signs for generations.
These groups only wanted to force local companies out of business. One anti-roundabout group “The Fender-Benders” was funded by a consortium of Great Barrington auto-body-repair shops.
Another conspiracy-heavy kerfuffle arose when Dr. Anthony Fauci, who at the time was considered the nation’s top infectious-disease specialist but who had nothing to do with transportation, was seen dining in Great Barrington. A Facebook user claimed to see Fauci driving through the intersection at Routes 7 and 23 and posted, “WHAT IS FAUCI DOING HERE?!?! Maybe nothing, but who knows?!?! I’m just asking questions!!!!”
During the summer of 2022, after the traffic light disappeared, temporary signage was posted and a rough draft of the roundabout began to operate, opponents immediately blamed it for weekend traffic in downtown Great Barrington, even though Main Street back-ups had been growing worse for years.
And by the time the project was completed that fall, the opposition had hardened into a constant, nonspecific rage—thus giving title to Drew’s six-volume history.
Initial protests were undertaken by lone-wolf actors who simply refused to drive around the circle. Instead, they plowed straight through at high speed, repeatedly destroying the central island’s raised curbs and expensive landscaping but making their point, whatever that point was.
The town had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on repairs, leading to higher taxes, which these same people then complained about at town meetings. There’s a certain IQ level “you can’t fix,” as another saying, which I do remember, goes.
Others chose to sacrifice their financial interest and often their driver’s license by purposely crashing their cars into other vehicles in the roundabout.
This was to run up accident statistics as part of their multifaceted campaign to have the roundabout removed, and included the repeated theft of all “Yield to Traffic in Roundabout” signs, which naturally led to confusion and accidents. Still, the roundabout remained.
As described in volume three of Drew’s history, “Book Three: Escalation to Madness,” by the summer of 2023 the movement began to launch increasingly disruptive actions.
On July 4, which opponents dubbed “Roundabout Freedom Day,” The Roundabout War reached a dangerous new level. That’s when a weeks-long protest was initiated by a new alliance organized under the banner of “Make Our Dangerous Three-Way Intersection Dangerous Again!”
Sporting their red “MODTWIDA!” hats, these committed activists filled the single-lane roundabout bumper-to-bumper with their cars and trucks and then just drove around at a crawl, effectively blocking all traffic. Each car was replaced by a new vehicle only when a driver slipped out of the formation to get more fuel or to eat and sleep.
Later on, during their criminal trials, some of the drivers claimed the whole thing “was no different than what someone might do during a normal tourist visit to Great Barrington.”
Their protest forced all downtown-bound traffic to detour through the elite “GB Hill” neighborhood, an area since protected by a crocodile-filled moat and accessible only via a guarded drawbridge, creating a separate furor. Ultimately, the Massachusetts National Guard was called in to clear the roundabout and restore order. Not something you see every day.
I’ll confess that like some others, I initially wondered if a roundabout was needed but was quickly convinced it made good sense. And not just because of MassDOT’s arguments. My view was informed by personal experience.
Naturally, opponents of the roundabout had their own hats. Image courtesy of Bill Shein.
Before the roundabout was constructed, I spent 15 years driving into town each day from the west on Route 23, stopping at the traffic light down from the Jewelry Mansion™, soon to become the Cannabis Mansion™, then Crypto Mansion™, Dollar Store Mansion™, until today’s Roundabout Overlook Café Mansion™, where I’d watch a not-insignificant number of fast-moving, often-texting drivers on Route 7 blow through the red light in both directions—sometimes well after it turned red.
That’s why it became my life-preserving habit to wait a few seconds after the light turned green before starting into the intersection. Thanks for the years of loud, impatient honking behind me, neighbors!
And during those few seconds, I’d often watch someone go screaming through their red light—someone who, if not for my prudent delay, would have T-boned my Honda subcompact.
There was certainly some irony that these frequent moving violations happened just outside the Great Barrington Police Department. As a public service, I considered gathering some helpful data for the town by spending a day on the hill overlooking the intersection, in a lawn chair with appropriate beverages, to count how many cars and trucks ran through the north-south red light in eight hours.
But the roundabout arrived before I got to it, proving once again that if you snooze you are likely to, soon thereafter, lose.
Another year of skirmishes kept The Roundabout War in the headlines well into 2024. But drivers slowly became accustomed to the new traffic pattern and the opposition eventually ran out of steam. Some staunch opponents even came to love it, renouncing their membership in MODTWIDA and joining the revelry each year on Roundabout Appreciation Day, when it is closed to traffic and filled with kids on bikes, clowns making balloon animals, food trucks, and the annual 50-50 raffle to support locals who lost their jobs in the auto-repair industry.
Descendants of the MassDOT engineers who built the roundabout are always feted at that night’s Annual Apology Dinner when we share our regret for baselessly hollering at their forebears during that 2018 public hearing.
Looking back, the conflict and rage over how to manage a single intersection in Great Barrington aligned all too well with that era’s political fever, a time when opinions based not on facts or evidence but on whim and emotion overwhelmed our democracy (July 4, 1776, to January 20, 2025), our climate (e.g. hard not to notice last night’s overnight temperature at the top of Monument Mountain was 105 degrees!), and our relationship with other, less-unraveled nations (see The Great Canadian Wall and Crocodile-Filled Moat built by our northern neighbor in 2027). Something to think about next time you’re piloting your air-powered, mind-controlled hovercraft through our still-standing, enormously popular, accident-reducing roundabout—the safety of which could be why I’m still here, at 105 years old, to write these very words.
Bill Shein’s new roundabout-inspired tattoo says, “Slow Down, Look Around, and Be Ready to Yield.”
