I’m a bit of an infrastructure geek. As a car enthusiast, I feel like it comes with the territory. After all, what good is a fast car if you have no good pavement to run it on? There’s no denying the natural overlap between the two subjects, and they tend to collide (forgive me) most spectacularly over the topic of traffic accidents. Have you ever had a social media post deleted because you were too mean to an intersection? I have. That’s how I learned such a thing was possible. Choose your hills carefully, folks; you only get to die on them once.
But that same forum was also how I learned of an annual report on the most dangerous intersections in Michigan, and now it’s something I look forward to every year (Seriously, guys, what took so long?). It’s a simple throwaway listicle produced by Michigan Auto Law, which is a chain of local law offices that specialize in (you guessed it) car and truck accidents. It’s mostly designed to drum up business, but the data come directly from the Michigan State Police’s accident database and their methodology is spelled out pretty cleanly, so I won’t waste space regurgitating it here. If anything, I might direct you to ClickOnDetroit, whose matter-of-fact repetition of the phrase “This is a roundabout” struck me as (unintentionally, I’m certain) funny.
Here’s the bottom line: of the 20 intersections with the most total collisions, five were roundabouts. They comprise three of the top ten—coming in at #2, #3 and #6—in a state where roundabouts represent a low-single-digit percentage of intersections. Bear in mind, the most recent list is based on 2024 data, so any intersection redesigns from this year won’t be reflected here.
The first roundabout on the list deserves the hate, if you ask me. This is 18 1/2 Mile Road at the beginning of the Van Dyke Freeway in Macomb County. Even without the data, I’m pretty confident I know where folks are getting jammed up. The southeast quadrant of this roundabout is a hot mess. Traffic coming from the west has to cross over traffic exiting the freeway to get to the eastbound onramp, creating the same sort of bottleneck you typically find in the weave lanes of a cloverleaf interchange. Throw in the north- and southbound through traffic and the roundabout element and you’ve got a recipe for a good, old-fashioned clusterf-. I’m sure this flows better than whatever it replaced, but I certainly wouldn’t call it good…