Round and About in West Bloomfield

This appeared in the West Bloomfield Eccentric on 9/13

Years ago, West Bloomfield, had a farmhouse every mile, and crowned or unpaved roads. Today, we still have most of the farmhouses, most of the crowned roads and a few still unpaved ones. Except that the farms themselves have been replaced by subdivisions with fancy homes on streets with no lights or sidewalks, so we can pretend we are living in the country. To keep things quaint, West Bloomfield is still a township, not even having bothered to become a city, as have Farmington Hills, Rochester Hills, and Auburn Hills.
As for traffic control, there is almost no controlled access from businesses to the roads they abut. There are very few left-turn lanes on main roads at entrances to subdivisions. I should also mention the bottleneck on Orchard Lake Road north of Pontiac Trail, courtesy of the city of Orchard Lake Village. We also have lots of people driving SUV's and super-sized pick-up trucks, which are not that easy to control, and whose drivers often talk on their cellphones while driving, often at high speeds.
But we do have one new thing. THE ROUNDABOUT! The first one, at Maple and Drake, has already sustained its first accident - fortunately a minor one. There are two lanes, and drivers are instructed to get into the inner one if they want to make a left turn. The problem is that they have to get into the outer lane by the time they reach the road they want to exit onto. This seems like a recipe for disaster to me, but what do I know? I'm only a cranky old mathematician, not a traffic engineer. So, round and round we go, and where we get off nobody knows!