Why A City In Florida Is Installing A Traffic Light At A Roundabout

When the county of Sarasota, Florida needed to fix a backed-up intersection, it turned to a solution that so many U.S. jurisdictions unfairly overlook: The roundabout. Unfortunately, rather than speeding up traffic, it appears the traffic circle has gone the way of others in Kentucky, where folks struggled with their first roundabout, and Connecticut, where drivers have no idea how to use them, simply unable to grasp the mechanics of going around in a loop. Now, Sarasota County is adding traffic lights to the rotary in hopes of clearing things up, but there's a bit of a complication with the plan. The roundabout may not even be the issue after all. 

Sarasota County's shiny new roundabout sits at the intersection of Apex Road and Palmer Boulevard, just off of I-75. It really is new — construction was approved in 2024, and the roundabout didn't open until January 2026. After less than half a year for drivers to learn the new route, though, it seems the roundabout had yet to alleviate congestion on Palmer Boulevard. As such, each entrance now has stop lights, turning the whole roundabout into essentially a standard four-way intersection with a nice median.

There are two primary reasons this is dumb. First, adding red lights to a roundabout entirely negates its traffic-smoothing qualities, and makes the entire construction project to build this traffic circle — a construction project that cost $9 million and took 13 months of work, mind you — useless. The second reason, though, is arguably even worse: Some locals say on Reddit's r/Sarasota that the backup isn't even from this intersection, but from a traditional stoplight intersection just 900 feet up Palmer. 

In short: Sarasota County had a traffic issue, and it addressed only one of multiple intersections involved. It turned that one intersection into a deeply weird roundabout, with split lanes that seem designed to funnel drivers into odd directions — look at the intersection with all its lane markers, pictured above, and tell me you wouldn't be confused at all your first time through — and then decided less than six months later to just put stop lights at the intersection anyway, making the entire project pointless. What are we doing here? What's going on?