08/08/2025
Slow life down, why rush to the final Finish Line?
We’ve seen this before. But what if it didn’t have to be this way?
The buttonhook is a highway engineer’s fever dream: six roundabouts engineered to keep traffic flowing to and from strip malls, fast food franchises, and big box stores.
It’s absurd.
And it’s also entirely too familiar across North America.
This is what happens when you get too much funding, too few ideas, and no clear guidance on prioritization. This is what happens when you try to reconcile highway speeds with access to strip development. Six roundabouts don’t fix that conflict, it institutionalizes it, putting bad ideas into concrete.
We can do something different. We can redirect this time, energy, and money into real challenges our communities can face. And we can do it from the bottom, up by building strong towns.
Read more in Charles Marohn's "Six Roundabouts to Nowhere" on our site! https://buff.ly/NAekxlM
