The future of Tigard traffic safety control is arriving along Southwest McDonald Street.
Preliminary designs for a $26 million overhaul of a 1-mile stretch of McDonald between Southwest Pacific Highway 99 and Southwest Hall Boulevard feature four roundabouts, more than double Tigard’s three existing roundabouts citywide.
While the city faces no mandate to deploy more roundabouts, transportation planners so keenly recognize their advantages that it would be out of step for the city not to continue identifying intersections where their use would make significant improvements.
“There’s just a lot more willingness and acceptance to look at them,” said Courtney Furman, the city’s principal engineer and McDonald Street project manager. “Safety is the primary goal. Roundabouts really help manage speed.”
“Like anything new, there is sometimes a time of adjustment,” Furman said.
In an evolution that stemmed from research and study starting in the 1990s, the Federal Highway Administration has classified roundabouts as “proven safety countermeasures,” largely because they have been shown to curb fatal and injury crashes by as much as 90 percent. Aside from safety upsides, roundabouts prevent cars from idling (and polluting) and eliminate long-term costs of maintaining electrical traffic controls.
The city’s McDonald Street improvements, expected to start in the first half of 2028, envision roundabouts at intersections of McDonald with southwest 103rd, 98th (Omara on the north side), 97th and 93rd avenues.
The River Terrace district, a comparatively new city development, is home to all three of Tigard’s existing roundabouts. As roundabouts become go-to designs for complex intersections, it’s no coincidence that the city’s seven roundabouts would be among its newest crossroads.
Southwest McDonald Street is a busy east-west corridor heavily used by students attending James Templeton Elementary School, Twality Middle School and Tigard High School. The street segment lacks bicycle lanes, crosswalks, sidewalks and turn lanes.
“It can be highly congested, especially at the Hall Boulevard intersection,” according to a city web page devoted to the project. McDonald Street is one of the “Top 5 Priority Projects” in the Tigard Transportation System Plan Update and aligns with Tigard’s Safe Streets Action Plan, the page says.
“The project takes a ‘Complete Streets’ approach to street design, operation, and maintenance, prioritizing people of all ages and abilities first – regardless of how they get around – whether walking, bicycling, using mobility aids, taking transit, or driving,’’ according to the page.
The web page says potential future improvements of the street include bike lanes, landscaping, paths, sidewalks and turn lanes.
City staff showed preliminary plans for the street’s improvements at a project open house on March 11.
