LETTER TO THE EDITOR
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The intersection at Drummond Street North and Mair Street can be incredibly difficult to cross, especially for elderly people and patients of the Ballarat Base hospital during busy times.
Patients often need to access both the hospital and their medical clinics across the road, or head back to their cars.
This is due to multiple different reasons.
One - the wide, flowing design of the roundabout there is focussed on safety for car collisions.
As it is quite a large roundabout it allows cars to travel through without necessitating braking before entry.
HAVE YOUR SAY THE BOTTOM OF THE LETTER
This roundabout therefore is only serving to prevent T-bone car accidents at the intersection as cars colliding on roundabout result in side to side collisions.
So while I think the roundabout was installed to both slow traffic and decrease the severity of collisions, I do not think the slowing traffic is working.
Due to this, the roundabout does not protect the safety of pedestrians.
Besides having ramps down to road level and tactile paving for the vision impaired, the crossings themselves are lacking any other infrastructure to protect pedestrians.
This leads to a false sense of security, increasing the dangers.
Tens if not hundreds of times a day people struggle to cross here, especially during busy times when the gaps between cars are minimal.
This intersection is an accident waiting to happen.
Thomas Lynch, Ballarat.