Bend's Roundabouts Can Be Roadblocks for Blind People. 3D-Printed Models Could Help. - The Source

Sharlene Wills ran her fingers over the small arrow on the crosswalk button for her first hint. She squared up to the crosswalk, stepping out slowly until she felt the bumpy surface under her feet. She heard the cars to her left roll to a stop and the chime of a robotic voice in the air.

“Walk sign is on to cross Division Street.”

“Forward,” Wills told her yellow lab guide dog, Hollywood, and the pair strode out. They reached a concrete median island, turning 45 degrees before crossing another lane of traffic to the other side. Cars rumbled by along Third Street, the U.S. Highway 97 business route.

Navigating Bend’s streets without the benefit of sight is a daily task for Wills, who is blind. Some intersections are more challenging than others, but it’s not always the busier ones that make for the bigger challenge.

The swirling sounds of Bend’s favorite form of intersection control — the roundabout — can be dizzying for people who are blind or have low vision. Some, like Wills, avoid them altogether. But Wills is advising on a developing project that uses 3D-printed intersection models to communicate Bend’s intersection design through touch. The handheld diagrams — also called tactile wayfinding maps — are meant to help blind and low vision people create mental images of intersections, giving more clues of where to cross and what’s ahead.

Sharlene Wills crosses Division Street in Bend with her guide dog, Hollywood. Credit: Eli Zatz

The project comes amid the Bend City Council’s heightened focus on safety-focused projects across town. In recent years, the City has introduced features like curb-separated bike lanes, concrete aprons, angled crossings and bright green paint meant to slow down drivers and give pedestrians and bicyclists more of a presence.

For people without sight, the changes aren’t intuitive.

“Anything new can throw us off,” said Wills, 78. She has glaucoma and has been blind since birth. “We draw a map or a picture in our heads of what we have to do to cross a certain street. Unless we can get that picture in the first place, we’re up the creek.”

That’s exactly what the 3D modeling project aims to do.

Making the mental maps

The City of Bend is working with Kittelson & Associates, a transportation engineering firm, and Timothy Gorbold, a local product designer whose company focuses on products for people with disabilities. At his workshop — a converted garage at his mother-in-law’s house — Gorbold customizes Kittelson’s intersection designs using computer models. He then creates the models with a set of small 3D printers resembling futuristic microwave ovens.

The final product is no more than a few millimeters tall. Rather than modeling the actual topography of the roadway, Gorbold created a set of symbols to communicate the layout of sidewalks, bike lines, concrete medians and traffic lanes.

“Instead of getting the information through their eyes, they’re getting the information through their fingers, through touch,” Gorbold said.

Timothy Gorbold, a local product designer, holds a 3D-printed intersection model inside his workshop in Bend. Credit: Eli Zatz

He’s modeled single-lane and multi-lane roundabouts, roundabouts with protected bike lanes and the new protected intersections.

Unlike the novelty of protected intersections, roundabouts have long been the City’s first choice when making intersection upgrades, due to their ability to reduce speeds and serious crashes. There are now more than 50 of them across the city.

But the thing that makes roundabouts safer for drivers leaves blind people without a primary auditory landmark — the sound of traffic moving parallel to the crosswalk, said Beezy Bentzen, founder of the transportation research group American Design for the Blind.

“The more they can understand about the spatial layout, the more they’re able to use other queues,” Bentzen said.

Bentzen worked on some of the first research into tactile wayfinding more than 50 years ago. While the tools are now a common practice for mobility specialists who help blind people navigate, not many jurisdictions have them available as a public resource, she said.

The plan is to put the models into a booklet that’s accessible to the public, said Derek Hofbauer, mobility programs manager with the City of Bend. As part of the prototype, users can scan a code with their phones to hear an AI-generated description of the models.

Rather than modeling specific intersections, the maps will provide a general concept of how new types of intersections work, with hopes that can be applied to most places across the city, Hofbauer said.

Using tactile maps to show blind and low-vision people transportation networks is not new. But 3D printing opens the door to mass-producing the models, which could make them more widespread, Gorbold said. He’s hopeful that progress will happen locally: a tactile intersection modeling with 3D printers was recently accepted as a capstone project at Oregon State University-Cascades, according to Gorbold.

Looking forward

Wills is hopeful that with the right models, roundabout navigation will finally click.

“The fact that they’re trying is very, very important to us,” Wills said. She is one of the people advising on the modeling project.

But there are other changes that could go a long way, she said, like moving pedestrian street poles closer to crosswalk entrances, and adding more raised ridges to sidewalks and streets.

According to Hofbauer, the City follows accessibility design guidelines for roundabouts. That includes raised indicators along bike ramps on shared-use paths, lowered sidewalks at crosswalk ramps, plus flashing beacons and audio signals for multi-lane roundabouts.

The project comes as the Bend City Council begins discussions around new transportation standards, which includes roundabout policy. One Councilor, Gina Franzosa, wants the City to take another look at its “roundabout first” rule, especially in more walkable and bikeable areas. In a recent meeting, Franzosa cited difficulties for blind people as one reason to consider other options.

This article appears in the Source June 11, 2026.