Meet ‘Rhonda the Roundabout,’ The Traffic Feature With Its Own Theme Song and Fan Page

The good people of Clarksville, Tennessee seem to love turning pieces of infrastructure into local heroes. I’m here for it. Years ago, one particular guardrail there kept getting crashed into, and so “Gary the Guardrail” was named and celebrated. Gary’s Facebook fan page doesn’t seem to be up anymore, but “Rhonda the Roundabout,” a new traffic flow feature in town, has stepped into the limelight thanks to a live-streaming traffic cam that’s caught the wacky antics of people getting lost on it.

Clarksville is northwest of Nashville, right under the Kentucky line. Rhonda is the new intersection of Whitfield Road and Needmore Road there. It’s so new that Google Maps is still displaying it as the regular old intersection it used to be.

In the time I’ve been writing this up, that truck with a tray bed and red front fender has done about a dozen laps. Looks like they’re trying to advertise something. *Google Maps, Clarksville traffic cam*

To me, it doesn’t look all that unusual. And indeed, local news pub Clarksville Now reports that most traffic has been flowing without incident. “The preponderance of folks know how to navigate these features, but it only takes a few to create a slowdown if they are unfamiliar,” David Smith, Street Department director, told the outlet.

So, why are we talking about it at all? That traffic cam I mentioned—which you can peek at here—has apparently caught people getting confused going the wrong way and, more hilariously, doing laps. As of Thursday, August 8, Rhonda’s Facebook fans have clocked the top three “high scores” of 50 laps (gray SUV), 25 laps (three motorcycles), and 21 laps (red pickup truck).

Surely those people were just having fun, or eager to test out the new blacktop. Big European Vacation vibes. Is anybody reading this old enough to remember that movie?

Anyway, back in Tennessee, Rhonda opened just two days ago on August 6 and already has its own Facebook page (5.5K members, as of this writing). It even has a theme song which I assume was created with AI, but it kind of slaps all the same. It’s at least as good as any pop-country song from the last decade, right?

Time to gas the truck up, crank this track up, and spin around Rhonda until you throw up. Shoot, that could be another verse!