East Avenue Roundabout Nears 165-Day Mark Without Documented Successful Navigation

WAUKESHA — The East Avenue roundabout will mark 165 days of operation Tuesday, and according to informal polling conducted by city staff, it has yet to produce a single documented case of a driver completing all four exits without hesitating, brake-tapping, or making at least one visible course correction.

The roundabout opened to traffic February 20, replacing what had been a four-way stop at East Avenue and Wisconsin Avenue that city engineers had flagged for years as a bottleneck. City Engineer Wanda Trebilcock said her office began the informal count in April after a staffer stationed at the intersection for an unrelated sidewalk survey noticed "an unusually high rate of second-guessing" and started keeping notes out of curiosity rather than any official mandate.

The Piggly Wiggly Metric

The adjacent Piggly Wiggly, whose parking lot sits closest to the roundabout's northeast exit, has become an unofficial data source. Store manager Renata Kowalczyk said the store now logs approximately 47 customers per week who enter the parking lot after circling the roundabout at least once and ask a cashier or bagger for directions, a 31 percent increase over the store's pre-roundabout estimate. "We didn't used to track this," Kowalczyk said. "We started because the same three baggers kept getting asked the same question and complaining about it at the same time every shift."

Kowalczyk said the store has not posted directional signage in response, citing a store policy against "getting into the roundabout business," but confirmed that at least one cashier keeps a hand-drawn diagram of the intersection under the register for customers who ask twice.

"We didn't used to track this. We started because the same three baggers kept getting asked the same question and complaining about it at the same time every shift."

— Renata Kowalczyk, Piggly Wiggly store manager

Operating As Designed

Trebilcock said the city stands behind the roundabout's design and pushed back on any suggestion that the 165-day streak reflects a flaw in the intersection itself. "The roundabout is operating as designed," Trebilcock said. "What we're seeing is a learning phase that may be somewhat longer than the learning phase for other roundabouts. We don't have a comparison roundabout in Waukesha, so we don't have a baseline for what a normal learning phase looks like here."

Asked whether 165 days without a documented clean lap was consistent with a learning phase, Trebilcock said the city does not currently have a definition for when a learning phase ends, but that her office "would know it when it saw it."

The city floated awarding a key to the city to the first driver confirmed to complete all four exits without incident, an offer first mentioned informally at a Common Council meeting in March and never formally withdrawn. No driver has come forward to claim it, and the city's informal tracking method, described by Trebilcock as "staff watching from the sidewalk when they happen to be walking by," has not been designed to catch every pass through the intersection.

An Independent Observer

Ned England, 70, of Backslide Way, said he has logged 11 separate half-hour observation sessions at the roundabout since June using the same radar gun he deploys for his neighborhood traffic documentation, though he clarified this count is unrelated to his ongoing lawn-chair surveillance of hospital traffic near his own driveway. "I go there on purpose," England said. "It's not the same project. I want that on the record."

England said his own tally, kept in a separate section of his garage notebook, shows zero clean laps out of roughly 340 vehicles observed, a figure he called "consistent with the city's numbers, for whatever that's worth coming from me."

Trebilcock said the city has no timeline for reassessing the roundabout's signage or lane markings and that the department's next scheduled review of the intersection is not until the roundabout's one-year mark in February 2027. "If day 165 isn't the day, day 365 might be," she said. "We're not in a rush. Nobody's been hurt. People are just going around more than once."