New roundabout draws praise
BY PETER B. BRACE
Already the asphalt is going down on Nantucket's first roundabout and the Planning Office has yet to receive a single complaint from drivers using it during nonconstruction hours.

The former stop-sign and yield-sign-riddled intersection at Sparks Ave. and Pleasant Street looked like a moonscape Monday as a Victor-Brandon crew re-worked the roadway. Slabs in the foreground are granite curbstones from the old intersection.

"It's going well," said Planning Director Andrew Vorce of the roundabout's construction by the Victor-Brandon Corporation. "They're on target with their construction and meeting all the conditions of the state."

The roundabout is replacing the problematic four-way intersection of Hooper Farm Road, Pleasant Street and Sparks Avenue in an effort to keep traffic flowing and cut down on wait times at the intersection's stop signs.

Whereas a rotary has its feeder roads running perpendicularly to the rotary, roundabouts slow traffic coming into it by providing deflection lanes that bend at each road's entrance to the rotary to force drivers to slow down. The right, outer lanes send vehicles