I have been driving from my driveway to the post office via Kagy Boulevard every Tuesday for twenty-one years. It is a precise, meditative journey that allows me to contemplate the changing seasons while maintaining a steady twenty-two miles per hour. That is, until the city decided to replace my favorite intersection with a roundabout.

A roundabout is simply a way for the city to admit they have run out of ideas. It forces a driver to navigate in a circle like a frantic squirrel, breaking the sacred straight-line momentum of my morning. I watched a gentleman in a lifted truck yesterday hesitate so long at the yield sign that I suspect he was trying to calculate the trajectory of the moon.

“It’s supposed to improve flow,” a city engineer told me when I called the department, sounding remarkably calm for someone who has dismantled a perfectly good stop sign. But flow is a state of mind, not a measurement of tires turning in a loop. When we stop at a light, we are part of a community. We wait together. We stare at the dashboard together.

By forcing us to constantly circle, we lose the silence that defined Bozeman driving. We are no longer travelers on a road; we are participants in a high-stakes geometry lesson we never signed up for. I’ve started taking the long way through the sprawl of Four Corners just to avoid the indignity of the yield, even if it adds twenty minutes to my errand.

If we keep trying to solve traffic by making driving more complicated, we are eventually just going to be driving in circles until there is no Bozeman left to arrive in.

Dale Crankshaft has been driving the same route to work since 2003 and considers any alteration a personal attack. He is retired but still drives the route.