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Comment by chrishannah | Hacker News Reader

That's not even the best "Magic Roundabout", the one in my town is much better! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempst...

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I'm Canadian. We had a work trip to the UK. My manager kept saying "I think I can handle driving in there, how bad could it be?". I told him we'd die.

As we went through the Hemel Hempstead magic roundabout in the back of a cab, he turned to me and said "Okay... you might have been right."

Statistically, you are less likely to die compared to driving in Canada. UK roads may be confusing, but they are significantly safer than Canadian roads, as measured by fatalities per billion km driven.

(And Canada is already among the safest non-European countries, with significantly fewer fatalities compared to the USA)

This was years ago and I have actually now driven in the UK myself. Yes, I'm sure overall I'd be less likely to die if I were driving every day in the UK vs driving every day in Canada.

But let me tell you, the first day driving on the other side of the road is a real doozy. And I nearly died a couple of times. And I was doing my very best to avoid "magic roundabouts".

(I actually drove all week through rural Wales, which was a different kind of adventure)

As a Canadian, you should be proud that for almost 60 years you had a junction that was much worse, and possibly unique: the infamous Armdale Rotary, where traffic on the rotary and traffic joining the rotary alternated in priority.

* https://web.archive.org/web/20190816111546/https://en.wikipe...

That one at least has the normal sign, with the small roundabouts marked as black circles.

Swindon is a weird exception for using the blue mini-roundabout sign on this type of junction. I think that makes the junction look more confusing than it really is.

Pah! I laugh at your pathetic 'magic roundabout', where the roundabouts don't even overlap.

Has yours had "Mad Mike" drift around it? ;) https://www.redbull.com/ie-en/videos/mad-mike-whiddett-drift...

There'd probably be a crash, it's never that empty.

Ahh yes, this roundabout where I managed to enrage a white van driver who then proceeded to tailgate right up the A1

Ha, I learned to drive around there in the late 90s, absolute nightmare.

But I'm pretty fearless these days!

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