Case studies of landscape and environmental impact evaluation of roundabouts

This paper is a follow-up to a previous one that presented a new method for evaluating the landscape and environmental impact of roundabouts borrowed from building technology and based on the needs, requirements and performance expected from an object rather than on prescriptions for and descriptions of its dimensions and quality. The proposed method aims at defining criteria to set up an information structure based on a need and performance approach capable of evaluating impacts on the landscape and environmental integration. After a brief résumé of the above-mentioned principles, two applications are presented in order to highlight two practical developments. The roundabouts on which the applications are focused are located in an urban and in a rural environment respectively in the Northern part of Italy. Obviously their analysis cannot be considered comprehensive of all possible cases but it covers a large proportion of them. Differences between the two roundabouts are many and they concern, besides the landscape and environment, geometrical dimensions, type of flow, presence of weekday users (pedestrians and bikers). The final evaluation sheets are presented and through them it is relatively easy to single out the problems and drawbacks of the roundabouts from the landscape point of view.