The city that removed its traffic lights (and what it taught us about school)
By Tony Cross, Principal – Byron Community Primary School
There is a city in Indiana, USA, that decided to do something radical.
Carmel, Indiana, a city of just over 100,000 people nestled north of Indianapolis, began replacing its traffic lights with roundabouts. Not one or two. All of them. Since the first roundabout was installed in 1996, Carmel has built more than 160 of them, more than any other city in the United States. It is now officially known as the Roundabout Capital of America.
The results were remarkable. Research published in the Journal of Safety Research found that injury crashes in Carmel were 47% lower than what would have been expected if the traffic lights had remained. At some intersection types, injury crashes fell by as much as 84%. Meanwhile, the city's population had grown from 30,000 to more than 100,000 people over the same period. More cars, more people, far fewer serious crashes.
Carmel didn't make its roads safer by adding more rules. It made them safer by designing a system that asked more of drivers. That idea sits at the heart of everything we do at BCPS.
The metaphor that changed how we think about behaviour
A few years ago, our staff had the opportunity to learn from Adam Voigt, one of Australia's most respected voices on school culture and Restorative Practice. Adam offered a metaphor that has shaped our thinking ever since.
He described two models for managing behaviour. The first is the traffic light: external signals that tell you what to do at every moment. Stop. Go. Wait. Comply. It works, in the sense that collisions are avoided when everyone obeys the signal. But it builds nothing. The moment the light is gone, you are on your own with no real capacity to navigate the situation.
The second model is the roundabout. No one is directing you from above. Instead, you are expected to read the situation, yield when necessary, watch for others, and keep moving. It asks more of you. It demands genuine judgement, not just compliance. But in asking more of you, it develops something in you.
The data from Carmel, Indiana proves the point. When you replace a traffic light with a roundabout, you are not removing safety. You are relocating the intelligence that creates safety, from the signal to the driver. And it turns out that when drivers have to think, to slow down and look and make decisions, outcomes improve dramatically.
Freedom With Responsibility at BCPS
At Byron Community Primary School, we talk a lot about freedom with responsibility. It is one of the most important ideas in our school culture, and it is genuinely countercultural in an educational landscape that often defaults to rules, consequences, and compliance.
Freedom with responsibility means we trust our children to make decisions. We trust them to solve problems. We give them real agency over their learning, their play, and how they treat each other. But that freedom is always held alongside a clear expectation: you are responsible for the impact of your choices on the people around you.
That is the roundabout model, applied to childhood.
We are not trying to produce children who behave well when an adult is watching. We are trying to develop young people who have genuinely internalised the capacity to navigate difficulty, to yield when the situation calls for it, to look out for others, and to keep things moving. Children who, when they encounter a hard situation without a teacher standing next to them, know what to do.
What this looks like day to day
In practice, it means we resist the urge to over-manage. We don't have elaborate systems of points, levels, and sanctions designed to control every moment of the school day. We have high expectations, clear values, and genuine relationships.
When something goes wrong between children, our first instinct is not to impose a consequence from above. It is to slow down, bring the people involved together, and ask the roundabout questions: What happened? Who was affected? What needs to happen now to make things right?
That is not the easy road. Traffic lights are simpler to install. A rule and a punishment is faster than a conversation. But the data from Carmel tells us what we already know from experience: the system that asks more of people produces better outcomes than the system that simply controls them.
The trust beneath the design
There is something else worth noting about Carmel's roundabout story. The city's engineers observed that outcomes improved partly because drivers became familiar with the system and understood its logic. The more roundabouts Carmel built, the more its residents understood how they worked, and the better they navigated them.
Trust and competence grew together.
That mirrors exactly what we see at BCPS. The longer children are with us, the more deeply they understand our values, the more fluently they operate within them. By the time our kids reach the senior years of primary school, they are genuinely capable of remarkable self-direction, peer leadership, and ethical reasoning. Not because we controlled them into it, but because we trusted them toward it.
Freedom with responsibility is not a soft option. It is an ambitious one. It asks more of children, more of teachers, and more of families than a compliance-based model ever would.
We think that is exactly right.
Tony Cross is the Principal of Byron Community Primary School, a small independent community school in the heart of Byron Bay. BCPS welcomes enquiries from families who share a belief that childhood is worth getting right.