Traffic Roundabouts Spread in U.S.

For real fun, try meeting the Magic Roundabout in Hemel Hempstead for the first time at night, in heavy rain that obscures the lane markings ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempste...

(I survived, but it was a close-run thing!)

Roundabouts are no panacea and are commonly used in situations where other solutions would make sense.

One example is when a minor road crosses a major one. At rush hour, the traffic going straight across can saturate the roundabout. You end up with congestion in all directions due to both faster traffic having to slow down for the roundabout on the major road and the traffic on the minor road being "stuck" waiting for a gap. A crossroads with lights would work better in this situation but these are less common in the UK for large intersections.

Roundabouts seem to be spreading internationally, too. That’s at least my experience. My small hometown in Germany (pop. 40,000) went from no roundabouts only ten years ago to at least four today. My even smaller university town (pop. 30,000) also has at least four brand new roundabouts. My own impression is that roundabouts were very uncommon in Germany only a few years ago but are no uncommon sight today.

I have never heard of any protest against them in Germany, only recently the exact opposite happened: the city wanted to put a traffic light at an intersection which lead many people to demand (unsuccessfully, in the end) a roundabout.

Roundabouts make a lot of sense when designed properly, and in the right place. I love them (they're just plain fun to drive through), but these are probably the top issues:

1. We mid-westerners, by and large, have never seen a roundabout before, let alone know how to properly drive through them. They weren't even so much as mentioned in driver's training classes around here until a few years ago. Whenever a new one goes up, there's a lot of confusion. The most common problem is misunderstanding or ignoring the yield sign: Some people treat the roundabout like a circular four-way stop and others just zoom in without yielding and cut off the traffic already in the circle.

2. Inconsistent entrance and lane rules. We have two major roundabouts in this town, both installed within the last five years. One of them prohibits lane changes inside the circle, one doesn't. At one of them, traffic entering the roundabout yields to traffic in the roundabout. In the other, vice versa.

3. Building roundabouts in an area for no good reason. On I-75 outside of Saginaw, there's an overpass with on and off ramps. A few years ago, they tore out the traditional traffic signal used on every single other on/off ramp in the state and instead put a roundabout on each end of the bridge. This was a very silly thing to do because the traffic volume was not that high in the first place. Moreover, it's a very industrial area with lots of big trucks and oversize loads that now have to navigate the roundabout very slowly and very carefully just to stay in the lane and not run into passenger vehicles whose drivers aren't paying attention.

While living in France, I read a piece which claimed that roundabouts were safer in part because individuals perceive them as more dangerous (than lights, etc.). This leads people to pay more attention and be more careful when faced with a roundabout, which in turn leads to safer driving generally. If this psychological observation is correct, then what scares us about switching to roundabouts in the U.S. might be exactly what will make it safer to adopt them.

Also, Slate had a piece on roundabouts and safety with the following quote:

"Mentioning roundabouts seems to invoke some form of the famous "availability bias," which leads people make judgments based on the memories that can be brought most easily to mind. And so, the American who may have driven as a tourist in France or Greece a number of years back will shudder with recognition, associating the roundabout with terror and near misses. But motorists with such memories often fail to consider that they were driving as tourists in unfamiliar climes, perhaps only for a few days."

http://www.slate.com/id/2223035/

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As a side note, there is something ironic about the pro-American / anti-Europe arguments that inevitably surrounds the roundabout discussion. It feels to me like roundabouts are much more American, following the libertarian strand running deep in this country. Round-about = gov't no longer tell you when you may (green) or may not go (red). Instead, it forces you to trust in yourself and your fellow citizens.

I grew up in a state that makes heavy use of roundabouts, but they call them rotaries. In general they worked wonderfully for traffic control although I did see the end results of a horrific accident when someone managed to go the wrong way on one causing a head-on collision. The ramps were highly angled in the "right" direction so they must have done it on purpose, although I can't imagine why.

Now I'm in another city where they are adding them all over the place including a street I commute to every day. The roundabouts here are significantly more dangerous than the ones we had where I grew up. Not only do people here not know how to use them (it's not like they are making people re-take their drivers license tests after installing these things), but they are not as well designed; most of the roundabouts here are being retrofitted into existing small intersections that used to be four-way stops. There's not enough room to curve everything the way so if someone goes when it's not their turn, it's going to be a right-angle collision.

I think roundabouts are great in theory, but they need to be done right and people need to be made to learn how to use them.

Don't underestimate the idiocy of traffic planners. In my town we have roundabouts and stoplights on the roads leading in.

I know of four roundabouts in my area (Minnesota.) Two work just fine and are properly marked.

One is completely useless, it's actually a series of 6 roundabouts attempting to control traffic in a shopping complex. The traffic level is so low that it might as well be normal, uncontrolled intersections.

One is used instead of a cloverleaf or stoplights to control the on/off ramps to a freeway. It's terribly marked and there is no way to know what lane you need to be in or where you ultimately need to go unless you've used it before. I have actually seen people get so confused that they just slam on their brakes and stop in the middle of the thing.

A lot of intersections in residential neighborhoods in Berkeley are very small roundabouts, about twenty feet across. This is part of the city's traffic calming policy (http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/contentdisplay.aspx?id=8238) , which also includes such things as random intersections that you just can't go through if you're in a car. As someone who doesn't have a car, I appreciate this, but I imagine that if I drove in town I'd be quite frustrated by the inability to use side streets. (Indeed, the main roads seem to be quite crowded.)

Here's one of my local roundabouts:

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&#...

(It's a large roundabout with 5 small roundabouts around it. Such that you can go round the large roundabout in either direction).

Great news the US is moving toward sanity.

We called them traffic circles in Syracuse New York. I drove through plenty of them in Ireland too, clockwise, which is a trip until you adapt to it.

I dream about roundabouts every time I'm stuck at a light in Silicon Valley and absolutely nothing is crossing the intersection. During rush hour here, the light stays green in one direction for several minutes, so you wait around a lot before you can get on to te main thoroughfares.

Will the use of the metric system be next?