Skip to main content

Tech Report Contribution

 1. Introduction

This report is written in response to a request for proposed improvements to the existing design and safety of roundabouts. It evaluates the downsides of current roundabouts and allows the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore to further improve road structure to increase safety for road users. When comparing roundabouts to traditional intersections, there is a 72% decrease in accidents on roundabouts than intersections. However, there is still a high possibility of accidents occurring on roundabouts.


Background

By redesigning the roads to roundabouts, especially at high accident rate and high traffic flow areas, it is able to improve traffic flow, reduce congestion and increase safety by minimizing the number of conflict points between vehicles. In order to improve traffic flow, roundabouts are designed to have cars move constantly in a counterclockwise direction at a steady pace without traffic signals or stop signs to interrupt the flow. Additionally, to increase safety for road users, roundabouts have 8 conflict points compared to traditional intersections with 32 conflict points. Vehicles speed will also be reduced to about 20 mph as the vehicles are always turning, thus preventing fatal accidents (Bottlinger, 2022).

Accidents involving Roundabouts

Although roundabouts can reduce the number of traffic accidents overall, it does not completely prevent traffic accidents. Common reasons for accidents on roundabouts are speeding, failure to yield, stopping abruptly, and unfamiliarity with roundabouts (Caroselli, Bleachler & Coleman LLC, 2022). 

Firstly, the average speed limit at roundabouts is around 20 mph, however, when vehicles are traveling at high speed before entering a roundabout, the chances of accidents occurring will be higher as the driver might not be able to react to other vehicles that are entering or exiting the roundabout. 

Secondly, as roundabouts do not have any stop signs or traffic signals, and serve as a continuous traffic loop, drivers are responsible to judge when it is their turn to go and when they are supposed to give way to oncoming vehicles, hence having insufficient knowledge about roundabouts would increase the chances of accidents happening. 

Thirdly, stopping abruptly on a roundabout, this causes huge accidents affecting cars traveling behind the vehicles resulting in rear-end collisions and leading to multi-car crashes, thus affecting the whole traffic on a roundabout.

Lastly, roundabouts with multiple lanes pose an increasing danger compared to single-lane roundabouts, especially when drivers attempt to skip across multiple lanes to exit the roundabout. Possibly leading to collusion with vehicles in the next lane or causing the vehicle to stop abruptly which would affect the traffic flow behind the vehicle


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Submission 1a: Descriptive Reflection: Self Introduction Letter

  Subject: Self Introduction Dear Mr Brad Blackstone,   My name is Justin, and I am writing to introduce myself to you as a student in your Critical Thinking and Communication (UCS) class. Some background about me is that I graduated from Singapore Polytechnic with a diploma in mechanical engineering. In the beginning, I had no idea what I liked, so I chose engineering as mathematics and physics are my strong suit. During my final year project in Polytechnic, I met with many industry leaders in the field of engineering, where they showed on the potential of engineering can do and how they are able to impact and make changes to people's life, and it successfully managed to pique my interest of engineering, hence I decided to continue my choice of engineering in university hence enrolling in this engineering program.  My weakness in communication is public speaking, as I tend to feel nervous when speaking to large crowd and in a classroom setting as well, because I ...

Critical Reflection

Module reflection: We are constantly using critical thinking and critical reflection in our everyday lives on a subtle level. Critical thinking is a few step process that starts by describing the problem, analysing the problem and gathering information online while cross reference the information to ensure that the information gathered is a valid and true. Next is to solve for the problem and evaluate the solution proposed. The next step is the most crucial step and is linked to critical reflection, which is to reflect on what has been done, so as to ensure that we will not repeat the same mistake in the future. As mentioned earlier in my self-introduction letter, I managed to achieve the goals I set for myself for this module, which is to be more confident when speaking in a large group and writing skills. Before the actual presentation, my team and I had done numerous rehearsals in order to prepare ourself. With the feedback provided by my teammates, it enable me to experiment the ty...

Summary Reader Response Draft 4

  In the article “The Future”, Lockett (2022) introduces the new discovery of lithium-sulphur batteries and how it will shape the future. Currently the battery tech of choice has always been lithium-ion battery. However, there have some downsides to using the battery. According to Lockett (2022), the raw materials that are needed to build lithium-ion battery are lithium, graphite, cobalt and manganese. However, cobalt is environmentally damaging as it leaches out toxic chemicals while mining it. There is also the life cycle problem where the lithium-ion battery will lose its power storage capacity if it is repeatedly being charged. Additional, battery degradation is also an issue for the electronic vehicle (EV) world as the cost to replace the battery is high. Thus, the battery will have to be thrown away and contributes to electronic waste which is becoming a problem for the world to deal with. There is also the density problem as Lithium-ion battery packs are quite energy-...