We’re getting an introduction on how it’s going to work, and that is a good thing. For if the series of roundabouts making up the Apponaug Circulator were to open all at once, it would be mass confusion.

Still, the project designed to expedite 25,000 vehicular trips through the village daily is foreign to these parts. It’s not that traffic rotaries are new. To make the poor play on words, they have been around for a long time. Rather, roundabouts with their more abrupt entries and tighter circumferences are engineered to reduce speed while affording a smooth flow of traffic. Lanes are established that make it obvious when a motorist entering the system can pull ahead or must pause for an openin …at least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.

This is a roundabout project on a massive scale.

Five intersections are being reconfigured and for some time now, motorists have experienced the effect of the elimination of a traffic signal at the intersection of Post Road, Veterans Memorial Drive and the Post Road extension. We can see with the restoration of two-way traffic on Veterans Memorial Drive, which hasn’t been the case since the 1970s, motorists won’t be able to turn left to cross the oncoming lane except at designated locations like police and fire headquarters. To reach other destinations will require traveling to the next roundabout to circle back.

Earlier this summer, with completion nearing on the Veterans Memorial Drive extension to the Centerville and Toll Gate Road roundabout, federal, state and city officials took the occasion to spotlight the $71 million project and crow about how it is on budget and on time. Indeed, those are laudatory accomplishments, as many of us can remember the years-long ordeal of the Greenwood Bridge project not so far away. As completed, sections of the system will open with two-way traffic on Veterans Memorial Drive and the extension and three roundabouts opening this year. Apponaug Four Corners and the stretch of Post Road in front of City Hall, which will remain one-way traveling east, are the final pieces to the plan. They should be completed by the end of next year.

While skeptics will question whether, in fact, this will make traversing Apponaug easier, and we suspect there will always be those who find fault, there’s no arguing that the project is changing the village. The water tower is long gone and the saw-tooth building is the last vestige of the mill that was the village center of industry and employment. Cumberland Farms has made a major commitment to the area. It is hopefully a harbinger of development and redevelopment to follow.

It is said the system will make the village pedestrian-friendly, encouraging the form of business seen on Main Street East Greenwich with its eclectic collection of small shops and restaurants. That is a dream, but then, too, was the circulator at one time.

Let’s hope with such an investment in infrastructure that we’ll benefit from the project other than cutting the time it takes to get through Apponaug.