Two New Roundabouts Coming To Newton: Mayor Ruthanne Fuller

NEWTON, MA — Newton is in the planning and design stages of building two new roundabouts to make city streets safer, said Mayor Ruthanne Fuller in a community update Thursday.

More than 4,600 roundabouts, different from rotaries in that they are smaller and slower moving, have been built across the country, with roughly 60 modern roundabouts in Massachusetts. T he first one in Massachusetts was constructed in Barnstable.

One of Newton’s new roundabouts will be at Commonwealth Avenue and Auburn Street in Auburndale at the west intersection near the border with Weston. This roundabout is part of the MassDOT project that includes replacing the structurally obsolete bridge on Comm Ave/Route 30 over the Charles River. Construction is expected to begin next summer.

The other roundabout will be at the Grove Street offramp of I-95 South and Quinobequin Road. MassDOT also has jurisdiction over this roundabout as it is an interstate offramp. Final plans are still being designed.

"These new modern roundabouts are much smaller than older designs,” Fuller said in a statement. "For example, most of us in Newton have likely driven around the rotary at Hammond Pond Parkway, Hammond Street, Newton Street/West Roxbury Parkway and Lagrange Street in Brookline near the border with Newton. This is an example of an older, bigger design."

"The Hammond Pond Parkway roundabout has a diameter of approximately 280 feet. The roundabouts in Newton will be half the size, between 120 and 140 feet in diameter,” she continued.

The smaller size of the roundabouts takes up less land and is purposefully designed with tighter turning angles, which means cars must slow down to about 20 miles per hour to enter and exit, Fuller said.

In addition, although cars move slowly in roundabouts, the traffic moves better than with traditional traffic lights at intersections and MassDOT is now considering installing roundabouts at every intersection where traffic signals need to be replaced.