More than two years of effort from east Ballard residents is finally paying off this week with the installation of a traffic circle at the intersection of Northwest 60th Street and Ninth Avenue Northwest.

Dawn Hemminger, president of the East Ballard Neighborhood Association, said she has travelled through that intersection by car and bicycle everyday for the past five years and had many close calls.

"People going north and south think it's a freeway, and people going east and west think it's a freeway, so nobody stops," Hemminger said.

In 2007, neighborhood resident Erin Alving applied for a city grant to create a traffic circle at the intersection.

The money was granted, but the large size of the intersection and the offset nature of the streets leading up to it caused hesitation on the part of the Seattle Department of Transportation, Hemminger said.

She said the Department of Transportation then looked at other traffic calming measures, such as chicanes and speed bumps, but they were unpopular because they would cause a loss of parking.

Alving got worn out spearheading the project, and the Department of Transportation dropped the it, Hemminger said.

The push for a traffic circle was restarted when another neighbor, Jason Jerome, took over the cause, she said.

The traffic circle proposal gained wider neighborhood attention during the June East Ballard Walking Tour, during which the intersection was a featured stop and residents posed in the middle of the street as a "human traffic circle."

The Department of Transportation came up with a unique design for the traffic circle and construction started the week of Sept. 21.

Luke Korpi at the Department of Transportation worked on the east Ballard traffic circle. He said it has an oval shape that will work well in the skewed intersection.

The oval design will ensure that vehicles approaching from all directions will need to slow down but still have enough space to travel through the intersection, Korpi said.

He said there will be a painted crosshatch on the southeast and northwest sides of the traffic circle to further encourage vehicles to slow down.

Hemminger said the traffic circle has not been popular with all the neighbors, though it is unclear why. She said some may have concerns about the effect on parking and visibility near the intersection.

Hemminger said the east Ballard group will make sure that whatever is planted in the traffic circle will allow for maximum visibility through the intersection.