I have lived in Belgrade since 1991, and I have seen a lot of pavement poured in the name of progress. Lately, it seems like the city planners have fallen in love with the roundabout. I am not against them in principle, but I am against them being the size of a dinner plate.

Last Tuesday, I was driving my truck through the new intersection near the north side of town. A fellow in a luxury SUV was attempting to navigate the circle at the same time I was. Because the center island is so small, he simply drove his front left tire right over the curb. He didn’t even look embarrassed. He just kept going, probably headed to a mountain bike trail or a high-end coffee shop.

If you make a roundabout too small, it stops being a traffic calming measure and starts being a suggestion. A real intersection should command respect. It should be wide enough that if you decide to take a shortcut through the center, you have to accept that you are officially off-roading. When the infrastructure is too polite, the drivers become bold.

We keep adding these circles to our roads, but we are designing them for go-karts, not for the three-quarter-ton pickups that actually keep this valley moving. If we want people to slow down, we need to build barriers that look like they could do some damage to an alignment.

I don’t want to be the person honking at the neighbor, but I also don’t want to watch the neighborhood get flattened one tire-track at a time. A roundabout should be a monument to patience, not a playground for people who can’t handle a steering wheel.

Gerald Fencepost has lived in Belgrade since 1991 and has strong feelings about most intersections.