Charlottetown's Riverside Drive could include two roundabouts as part of a major upgrade, says Transportation Minister Ron MacKinley.

Charlottetown currently has no roundabouts, though there is one planned.

MacKinley said some of the plans for Riverside Drive, a section of the Charlottetown bypass that runs from the Hillsborough Bridge to St. Peter's Road, are already set. It will be widened to four lanes with a berm down the middle.

"This is a very busy section of highway," MacKinley told CBC News Monday.

"There's 24,000 cars going by here a day and sometimes there's more in the summer."

Getting on Riverside Drive can be difficult, particularly at Exhibition Drive and by the energy-from-waste plant. Typically P.E.I. has used traffic lights at locations such as this, but MacKinley said putting two traffic lights so close together doesn't make sense.

"Islanders don't like signals. They're complaining to me about the bypass having too many signals, so we are exploring the idea of roundabouts," he said.

"[I] saw a lot of them when I was in California, saw them when I was in Ireland before, and we are looking at that possibility to see how it's going to work."

MacKinley said roundabouts are safer than intersections because the cars aren't going as fast if there is a collision.

The work on Riverside Drive is expected to begin this spring, with or without the roundabouts. The cost of the $6-million-plus project is being shared by the federal and provincial governments.