User:Csernica/Sandbox/Flemington Circle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Flemington Circle is the largest of three traffic circles in the environs of Flemington, New Jersey and sits just to the southeast of Flemington's historic downtown. U.S. Highway 202 and New Jersey State Highway 31 approach the circle separately from the north and continue south merged, and the circle is the eastern terminus of New Jersey State Highway 12. It is one of only a handful of New Jersey's once-endemic traffic circles still extant according to its original design.

This circle is problematic in its own way. It has a fairly complex feeder pattern, and more than the usual number of businesses connect their parking lots directly to it, but unlike the nearby Somerville Circle (as originally constituted) right-of-way for vehicles on the circle is not clearly established. The southeastern side is flattened so as to allow traffic on northbound U.S. 202 to pass directly through, and on that segment it's the highway traffic that has right-of-way. This can be extremely confusing to anyone not familiar with this arrangement. Furthermore, vehicles approaching via the near-tangential feeder from Highway 31 often take right-of-way even though it is not strictly speaking theirs. This mainly happens when they want to proceed to Highway 12 since the circle is two lanes wide at this point, but can make for a chaotic merge with vehicles already on the circle that also want to proceed on the same highway.

The other two traffic circles in the area are both west of the Flemington Circle along Highway 12. Both are unnamed and handle a much smaller volume of traffic.