Changes coming to Auburn and Main streets roundabout in effort to reduce crashes

By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — The city is preparing to make changes to the Auburn and Main streets roundabout in an effort to reduce the number of crashes at the circular intersection.

The city plans to re-stripe the two-lane intersection during the first week of June so that only one lane of traffic will flow through the roundabout, which was dedicated as Veterans Memorial Circle when it was rebuilt from a signal-controlled intersection more than a decade ago. The shift to one lane will happen about 500 feet before the intersection from each approach. The city considers it a pilot program to test if the changes successfully reduce crashes.

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“The only roundabout in the entire United States that has been dedicated as a veterans memorial happens to be the area where more accidents happen than anywhere in Winnebago County — and that’s just tragic,” said Ernie Redfern, an Army veteran and co-chairperson of the Friends of Veterans Memorial Circle, the neighborhood group organized six years ago to beautify and landscape the circle beyond what city crews could provide.

“I’m hoping it makes this area safer and will reduce the accident rate in a way that truly reflects our efforts to try to make this a fitting tribute to Winnebago County veterans,” Redfern said.

The roundabout opened in late October 2013 after a $10 million construction project funded by the Illinois Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the Main Street portion of the intersection.

The city’s idea to re-stripe the intersection comes from something traffic engineers noticed about those early days at the roundabout. It was open for three months as a one-lane roundabout while the finishing touches were made on the project before fully opening as two lanes.

“During that three months, there were zero accidents,” said Jeremy Carter, the city’s traffic engineer. “We got our first accident the day it opened as a two-lane roundabout.”

Now, it’s the most crash-prone intersection in Rockford.

“Most years, Main and Auburn has the most accidents of any intersection in the city,” Carter said. “With that said, the vast, overwhelming majority of the accidents there are little fender-benders.

“They’re property-damage accidents. The intersection has very few injury accidents because people are going at a low speed inside of it, and that’s what roundabouts are designed to do.”

The decorative brick wall around the flag at the center of the roundabout has been damaged multiple times by drivers who careen right into the center of the roundabout. Carter said the majority of those crashes were due to distracted driving or intoxicated drivers. However, he said the common crashes that happen at the intersection are often because of driver error and improper lane usage, which he hopes re-striping will fix.

“It’s hard to have improper lane usage when there’s only one lane,” Carter said. “We’re hoping this pilot program will reduce the accidents.”

To configure and get approval for the change, the city worked with IDOT, which has partial jurisdiction in the area because North Main Street is Illinois Route 2

“Initially there will be barricades up and arrowboards up — similar to when it was under construction — to get drivers used to the traffic pattern change,” Carter said. “As the pilot program moves along, if it’s successful, we hope to start removing arrow boards and barricades and just have the drivers work under the change in striping.”

Few people, if anyone, spend more time at the roundabout than Ernie Redfern and Helen Karakoudas Redfern,  who as co-chairs of the nonprofit committee that beautifies Veterans Memorial Circle lead maintenance of the thousands of flowers their volunteers plant. (Karakoudas Redfern is also a freelance journalist who on occasion writes for the Rock River Current.)

The city dedicated the intersection as Veterans Memorial Circle in honor of the more than 500 Civil War veterans buried nearby at Greenwood Cemetery. Within a year, plaques were installed beside a monument wall at each quadrant of the roundabout to tell the area’s military history.

For the past two years, the Friends group has put a concerted effort into educating motorists about roundabout rules and encouraging motorists to slow down.

“Right now, we are really in fear when we cross the public streets in a crosswalk because people do not stop,” Ernie Redfern said.

This Saturday, the group hosts its annual planting day, when dozens of volunteers plant thousands of flowers to beautify the circle and its approaches as a way of honoring local veterans and military families.

A year ago, as the Redferns staged their event on the Friday before planting day, they witnessed five crashes in the course of about nine hours.

Ernie Redfern said he’s happy to see the city institute changes at the roundabout, but he would’ve preferred more police enforcement to correct drivers’ bad habits.

“We spent all this money to make a multi-lane roundabout that we’re about to just reduce to one lane,” he said. “I like that for the safety factor, but I hate it for the fact that we’re surrendering.”

Carter said the reduction to one lane will result in some longer wait times to move through the intersection, but he doesn’t expect it to take as long as it did during the years Main and Auburn streets was controlled by a traffic signal.

“It will be nowhere near that sort of delay,” he said. “With a reduction in lanes, during certain times of the day, you may have to wait at the intersection a little bit longer.There may be a little bit more of a queue, a little bit more of a backup from the intersection.”

Carter said that if there is an increase in crashes after the change, or a substantial increase in delays at the intersection, the city will consider changing it back to two lanes.

This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on X at @KevinMHaas or Instagram @thekevinhaas and Threads @thekevinhaas