CAMBRIDGE — Busy Franklin Boulevard will be converted to a string of 11 roundabouts, at a cost of up to $53 million.

Waterloo regional councillors voted 13-0 Tuesday to install roundabouts as a way to handle traffic growth and improve safety, while keeping the road four lanes wide south of Highway 401. The alternative was to widen the congested road to six lanes and expand intersections with traffic lights.

Construction of the first circles could begin in 2013. The conversion would be phased in over several years.

Roundabouts have worked well elsewhere in the region and they will work well on Franklin Boulevard, Cambridge Mayor Doug Craig said. He expects the circles will reduce dangerous collisions that currently plague the road.

He warned that politicians will need to educate people about the traffic circles, and persuade some skeptical drivers to accept the change. “The main issue here is dealing with the whole concept of change,” Craig said.

Critics argued the roundabouts will frustrate drivers accustomed to using Franklin as a speedway. “The eight-kilometre corridor will only prove to be dangerous and chaotic,” Murdeen Kuret said.

Kuret predicts seniors will switch to Hespeler Road, to avoid roundabouts they don’t understand and can’t grasp. “Most of them have no interest in learning,” she said.

Her husband Rudy Kuret owns a beauty salon that will be displaced by a roundabout proposed at Franklin and Dundas Street. Councillors said they expect to negotiate the relocation of the business.