New Roundabouts and Traffic Signals Slated for Midtown Bend

A planned $15.4 million project will bring two new roundabouts and two new traffic lights to Olney Avenue and Revere Avenue in midtown Bend, with an estimated completion date in 2028.

The project includes swapping a pair of four-way-stop intersections for traffic signals along Fourth Street, and another at Eighth Street and Revere. At Eighth and Olney Avenue, the City tentatively plans to replace a stoplight with a roundabout. Those upgrades were listed in a $190 million transportation bond package Bend voters approved in 2020.

The roundabouts and signals are slated for the heart of the Orchard District, neighborhood between the Bend Parkway and Pilot Butte. Historically dominated by single-family homes, it’s growing denser with pockets of multifamily homes and planned apartments.

Olney and Revere Avenue also serve as key cross-town routes, connecting Bend’s west side with places including St. Charles Hospital and Pilotte Butte Middle School with Bend’s west side.

“At some point, a four-way-stop just stops being efficient for capacity, and we would start to see long delays here,” said Carrie Harris, project engineer with the City of Bend.

That could lead to unsafe turns, she said.

“You’re kind of leaving it up to users to decide when it’s safe for them to move through the intersection,” Harris said, adding, “Something like a signal relieves that quite a bit.”

The City chose to install traffic signals at Fourth Street instead of roundabouts because of proximity to other traffic signals on Third Street, the U.S. Highway 97 business route one block away. Roundabouts could have caused lines of cars to back up into Third Street, but a signal allows the City to synch the lights to create a “green wave” and move cars through, Harris said.

The City plans to build a single-lane roundabout at Eighth and Revere, a little more than a quarter mile to the east, according to a presentation Harris gave to the City Council Wednesday.

Roundabout or signal?

At Eighth and Olney, plans are less certain.

Some city councilors said Wednesday they wanted to consider whether a traffic signal might be a better option than a roundabout at that location. Given their safety and efficiency, roundabouts are the City’s default intersection when modeled to perform as good or better than other options. Engineers anticipated moving ahead with one at Eighth and Olney, though they planned to continue analyzing whether it would be single-lane or multi-lane.

“I’m actually kind of interested, maybe when the analysis comes back, that we actually look at and have a little bit of a conversation about the context of this location and whether there are some spots in town where roundabouts don’t make sense,” Councilor Gina Franzosa said Wednesday. She said replacing the existing traffic signal with a newer, more efficient signal would be cheaper and could be safer for pedestrians, especially people who are blind or low-vision.

City modeling predicts a single-lane roundabout at Eighth and Olney would reach capacity by 2031, but a multi-lane roundabout would provide better traffic relief. Studies have shown those are more difficult for pedestrians to cross than single-lane roundabouts.

Bend City Councilor Mike Riley said he believes it would be valuable to hear about differences in cost and safety with a roundabout versus a signal.

“I think it’s a legitimate question to ask at different places, and maybe this is one of them,” Riley said.

The City plans to hold an open house on the project this fall.