Driving You Crazy: The roundabouts on Lowry Boulevard make no sense

DENVER — Matt from Denver writes, “What's driving you crazy? The roundabouts on Lowry Blvd make no sense. Some lanes are allowed to go forward and others are forced to turn. The ones that are forced to turn are usually not the ones with more traffic such as the eastbound lane at Lowry and Yosemite. The far-right lane is forced to turn but there is more traffic going east so why aren’t both lanes allowed to go straight to help with the volume of traffic?”

The tricky part about roundabouts in metro Denver is there are so many different types and ways to get through them. Some have one lane, others two or three. Some allow for turns, others don’t and that adds to the overall confusion of drivers who use them.

I went out to drive the roundabouts and I found them to be fairly straight forward, unless you are in the right lane where you are forced to make a right turn at the first exit. It is like that for all the right turn entrances at Lowry Boulevard and Yosemite Street.

The left lane allows drivers to either make an immediate right or continue through the circle and leave at any of the exits. The right lanes, all of them, must take the first right after entering the roundabout.

MORE: Read more traffic issues driving people crazy

I asked the City and County of Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) about why the roundabout is laid out like this. I was told that it is striped this way to prevent the significant number of side-swipe crashes that were occurring. The side swipes were coming from left lane drivers trying to exit the roundabout while the right lane driver was trying to go straight to the next exit. Now, the left lane is allowed to go straight or right and the right lane is only allowed to go right.

There are other roundabouts around metro Denver that will allow for two lanes to go around part of the way like the one at Lowry and Uinta Way, just west of the one at Yosemite. That one allows for both westbound lanes to bypass the first turn and continue on along Lowry. It also allows for left lane drivers to merge over and exit at northbound Uinta.

City engineers told me they don’t have any plans to change the layout of the one at Yosemite nor the one at Uinta or Rampart Way that also allows for multi-lane movements.

My advice, be in that left lane if you want to continue on. If you end up in the right lane, remember that lane changes are discouraged over a single solid white line, but it is not illegal. It is illegal to stay in that right lane and drive over the diagonally line painted box. That move would also be quite dangerous with a high potential risk for a crash.

Denver7 Traffic Expert Jayson Luber says he has been covering Denver-metro traffic since Ben-Hur was driving a chariot. (We believe the actual number is over 25 years.) He's obsessed with letting viewers know what's happening on their drive and the best way to avoid the problems that spring up. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram or listen to his award winning Driving You Crazy podcast on any podcast app including iTunes, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Podbean, or YouTube.