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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Hemel Hempstead, North of London, has an even better one.

It's actually 6 roundabouts forming a seventh (the Swindon one is only five forming a sixth) and it's also over a waterway.

As the taxi drove us through that madness, my boss turned to me and said "okay, you were right, it's best we didn't rent a car and try to drive to ourselves".

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It's not the number of roundabouts that makes Swindon hard, it's the number of lanes per junction and the proximity of the spot islands to each other.

For reference, Colchester also has a "magic roundabout" with the same structure of Hemel's but Swindon's is easily the worst of the 3 because the whole thing operates as one junction due to how tightly packed the roundabouts are. Whereas Hemel and Colchester can be treated as 6 and 5 (respectively) separate junctions circling an island. That makes a huge difference when driving around these kinds of roundabouts.

My taxi driver at Hemel decided the inner circle was one giant American roundabout and ignored the other little ones.

I used to work in Hemel, I never saw an accident. Affectionately known as the 'magic roundabout' (after the children's show)

It worked surprising well, if a little 'when all you've got is circles, everything looks like a roundabout' solution.

https://goo.gl/maps/QZJzPG7wDE22

The Plough is much simpler to handle imo, because you're only directly dealing with one roundabout at a time, the "meta-roundabout" is more incidental rather than the mess of Swindon.

Not quite strictly true. You can traverse the inner roundabout without having go full circle around each of the satellites.

True but these functionally behave like "roundabout bypasses": if you want to take a right at the roundabout, for the biggest and most engorged roundabouts around here it's common to have a lane letting you turn without entering the roundabout.

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