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Roundabout apostle comes full circle, revisits Bird Rock

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With his white hair and bushy handlebar mustache, Dan Burden looks like a lanky cousin of Mark Twain or Albert Einstein.

In fact, he’s the artist who as a young man went on the road and wound up redesigning the road.

As a Bird Rock resident for some 35 years, I had to resist the temptation to drop all pretense at journalistic detachment and kiss this guy dashing around La Jolla Boulevard in his trademark fluorescent highway safety vest.

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Named by Time magazine in 2001 as one of the six most important civic innovators in the world, Burden is a star, though not starry-eyed, traffic calmer emeritus.

Called the Johnny Appleseed of walkable communities, he’s reputedly worked with some 3,500 towns and cities around the world to make streets safer, quieter, healthier and, if that wasn’t reward enough, wealthier.

In San Diego this week for a Highway 101 forum in Carlsbad on Thursday evening, Burden paid a visit to his favorite child, the comely one who turned into an urban supermodel.

In front of the Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, a local hangout that opened a couple of years BR (Before Roundabouts), Burden’s pride brims over.

“It’s so special,” he said, waving his arms at the Starbucks building across the street. “It’s so revolutionary.”

I asked Burden how he measures the transformation from what he calls “a very hot, very miserable” boulevard, a dangerous runway of asphalt, to the cool laid-back oasis it is today.

“What do you see?” I asked.“The first thing I see is what I don’t hear,” he said with a Mark Twainian twinkle.

This busy artery, once a stretch of Highway 101 as it wound from La Jolla to Pacific Beach, handles an estimated 22,000 vehicles a day.

When Burden first laid eyes on the five lanes on La Jolla Boulevard, two going each way with a hair-raising turning lane, he was on an impromptu tour with District 1 Councilman (now Congressman) Scott Peters.

Peters knew the community was ready for dramatic change, but he needed the likes of Burden, the all-ears pitch man, to lead the divided herd to blue water.

Here’s what Burden said of Bird Rock in a recent interview for Blue Zones, a well-known longevity institute for which he’s now the director of “Innovation and Inspiration”:

“Motorists,” Burden said, “understandably dreaded this change before it was made. But they found that instead of waiting 24 seconds for a pedestrian to cross 72 feet of road, they now only wait 3-4 seconds, or don’t have to wait at all. Businesses that feared the loss of customers arriving in cars actually improved their trade about 35 percent, new stores were built, noise levels were reduced 77 percent, and the value of land within walking distance climbed. Far more people started walking and bicycling. But, most interestingly, motorists started driving 19 mph on 2.5 miles of La Jolla Boulevard, instead of 40-45 mph, then stopping and stopping again. Today motorists are getting to their destinations in less time, because they aren’t stopping.”

Bird Rock’s commercial strip now has five single-lane roundabouts linked by two relatively narrow 10-foot driving lanes. On the west side, angled parking doesn’t impede the southbound flow of traffic thanks to an extra cushion for backing out.

If it sounds complicated, well, it is. But that’s the genius.

The paradox that drives roundabouts (don’t confuse with old-fashioned rotaries or circles) is that motorists drive slower but travel faster.

Safety has a similar circular zen logic.

The late European traffic pioneer Hans Mondermann, a sort of Dutch uncle to Burden, famously posited that, when it comes to driving, “unsafe is safe.”

The more drivers are regulated with stoplights and signs, the more likely they are to seek advantage, he argued.

Human beings resent stupid rules, and they flout them at every turn.

They’ll speed up to beat red lights, gun their engines once lights finally turns green. They’ll waste gas and emit clouds of pollution to exert their freedom over inflexible rules of the road.

Roundabouts, on the other hand, require the same instinctive vigilance ice skaters must exercise as they glide around on a rink. Roundabouts are designed for low-speed cooperation, intuitive improvisation, not robotic obedience to lights and signs.

Fortunately, the physics of roundabouts are compelling, likely appealing to Einstein, who supposedly developed his theory of relativity going around on a bicycle.

Fatalities are practically unheard of at roundabouts where traffic is always merging at an angle, not head-on or at 90 degrees.

And a few years ago, the MythBusters on the Discovery Channel conclusively demonstrated that roundabouts are at least a fifth more efficient in moving cars than four-way stops.

I can attest, and I’d bet that 75 percent of my fellow Baja La Jolla villagers will agree, that the razing of stoplights — and the raising of roundabouts — was the best single civic decision in our burg’s history.

It wasn’t free, of course. Burden gushed about the trees and plants, a crucial (and assessed) investment to animate the field of vision and thus slow drivers down between the roundabouts.

“If this landscaping wasn’t here,” Burden said, “we’d probably lose a third of the effectiveness.”

Pretty, efficient, safe.

The pity is that it’s so hard for communities to accept the short-term pain of ripping out stoplights and stop signs, the angst of assessments, disruptive construction. Easier to accept the familiar squalor engendered by mind-numbing stoplights and barren streets.

Bird Rock, on the other hand, was ripe for the radical embrace of roundabouts at the turn of the century because it was so fed up with being La Jolla’s poor relative united by an ugly and dangerous speedway.

“This,” Burden said, waving his arms, “is the most provable example that these things work, more than any string (of roundabouts) in the country.”

High praise indeed from the street-wise high priest.

logan.jenkins@sduniontribune.com

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