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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

The car from the inner lane swiping into the car in the outer lane is the exact issue I'm talking about. The problem is when drivers enter in the left/inner lane, fully intending to take the first exit. If they proceed to exit directly from the inner lane, without first changing lanes, signalling, or yielding to outer traffic, they would intersect with a car in the outer lane innocently heading to the second exit.

In practice, people are not able to navigate two-lane roundabouts in a compliant and safe manner. Any intersection of roads busy enough to have two lanes in each direction is too busy for a roundabout to be safe.

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It’s still safer than a normal intersection. Roundabouts prevent HIGH SPEED t-bone and head-on collisions. The difference in safety is easily worth the “cognitive load” of a 2-lane roundabout.

I think drivers will get used to them and in practice there will be few collisions.

> I think drivers will get used to them and in practice there will be few collisions.

I think drivers will avoid them at all costs since even low speed collisions can cause extremely expensive repairs (and even total an older vehicle) meaning they'll never get the practice they need to navigate them safely, yet eventually those drivers will find themselves in a situation where a roundabout can't be avoided and suddenly it's chaos for every car in the intersection.

Even if multi-lane roundabouts were suddenly everywhere we'd probably need generations of new drivers trained to use them in drivers ed classes as teens before you could just trust people to be able to navigate them correctly

> The problem is when drivers enter in the left/inner lane, fully intending to take the first exit. If they proceed to exit directly from the inner lane, without first changing lanes, signalling, or yielding to outer traffic

Yes, in that case a driver not understanding the rules of the road (that you can't take the first exit from the inner lane, which is usually clearly signed) could cause an accident. The exact same way turning right from the left lane in a signalized intersection can cause an accident. The question is, what's the damage of an ignorant driver and how fast do people learn? The research indicates that right-of-way incursions in a roundabout result in dramatically fewer injuries than right-of-way incursions at other types of intersections, and the research also indicates that contrary to your belief, drivers actually do learn how to use them.

The experience of most NZ cities and towns on a daily basis says otherwise.

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