Truck suffers break down in middle of Oak Street roundabout

Posted by Howard Owens on August 17, 2009 - 9:22pm
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A semi-truck was temporarily stuck on Oak Street roundabout this evening.

The cause may have been a broken air line to the brakes, according to Batavia Police Officer Chris Camp. 

The line may have broke because of the current height difference between the brick inner turning circle and the outer asphalt area.

The truck was stuck on the circle for only a short time. It was no longer on scene by the time I arrived and I live close by (hence, no picture).

For those who don't know, as Camp explained to me, air brakes on trucks work differently than car brakes. On trucks, the brake pads are separated from the wheel and held apart by air pressure. In this case, when the air line broke, the brake pads contracted, causing the tire to stop spinning.

Posted by C. M. Barons on August 18, 2009 - 10:47am
After months of low-level curiosity about "roundabouts," (isn't it a 70s song by the band, Yes?); I finally drove by the thing. It's a traffic circle! When I was a kid, most intersections with more than four adjoining roads were resolved by a traffic circle. Burghs like Caledonia erected statues or fountains in the center of the things. Bigger burghs like Avon could put a park inside their circle. There was a huge circle on the east side of Veterans Memorial Bridge in Rochester. It confounded my father- each time we went to visit my uncle who lived in Irondequoit. ...And I was expecting something novel. I guess the DOT figured that renaming the thing would eliminate the irony: since they engineered most of the old ones out of existence in the 1960s.