Wide median treatments are commonly found on duplicated rural highways in Victoria where the volume of traffic on side road(s) means it is uneconomical to grade separate the intersection. These intersections are known to be unsafe because they can appear to motorists on the side roads to be a roundabout.
The first question we always ask is ‘can we just make it a roundabout?’.
If that’s not possible, the ‘not-a-roundabout’ problem can be solved by providing a left-out followed by a U-turn downstream, but it doesn’t remove the conflict of the U-turning vehicle joining what is often a stream of fast-moving traffic.
The following three options (Figure 3) are alternative layouts that remove this conflict.
