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Comment by meheleventyone | Hacker News Reader

All the different rules for roundabout are fun. In the UK you’re expected to filter to the outside leave. In Iceland the person on the inside has priority to leave so you can still enter the roundabout but need to watch for someone already on the inside wanting to leave at your first exit. The rules are similar to the Netherlands in that you either go straight or 3rd exit from the inside and should only go first exit on the outside, although it’s totally possible to carefully go all the way on the outside. I still find the Icelandic system mildly bonkers but not due to the choice stress as it’s usually obvious which lane you need.

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Careful with terminology too, because "inside" and "outside" don't mean the same thing to different drivers, particularly in the UK compared to elsewhere.

Many people hear "inside lane" on a motorway and think it's the "fast lane" near the central divider but that's actually the "outside lane". ( source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/outside-... ).

But that terminology has been confused over time and so many people get it the wrong way around that the DVLA has stopped using it in the highway code.

Do you know the origin of the UK use because that always confused me as it’s obviously wrong from the drivers perspective of the road! My wild guess would be that from the drivers seat you look outside to the fast lane and look across the inside of the car to look to the slow lanes.

The normal terminology for the sides of a car are 'nearside' and 'offside', with the nearside being where the kerb is, offside being where other cars would be.

So I would suppose 'inside' and 'outside' were also considered relative to the kerb.

The fast lane is the furthest lane away from where you'd enter the motorway, therefore it's the outside lane (or so the logic goes!)

But... aren't entrances/exits usually on the "outside" of something?

Wow, I'd never thought of it like that. I'd always assumed "outside lane" was the lane closest to the "outside" of the road (ie. the edge) and "inside lane" was the opposite, and was very confused when I found out some people used it the other way around.

> “In the UK you’re expected to filter to the outside leave.”

In practice, large multi-lane roundabouts in the UK usually have lane markings as you enter, with specific lanes for each exit. In general, so long as you were in the correct lane as you entered the roundabout, the lane markings should guide you to the correct exit and you shouldn’t have to do any filtering.

Except the surprisingly common case that lanes are mislabelled... Ie. "I was in the lane marked M4, I followed that lane round perfectly, and suddenly the label in the lane changed to A205! I better change lanes. Oh actually the lane I was just in is now marked M4 again."

The problem seems to be that a lane that goes to two places is sometimes marked inconsistently with each of the two places - meaning you think you are in the wrong lane, when you are not.

And the good ones have lane markings that guide you to the exit as you go around too

Yeah for sure, otherwise it'd be quite scary! Although there are plenty, particularly where there might be more exits where its pretty easy to mispredict where your lane will end up.

Yes. One gets used to the system and then it works okay. That ridge dividing lanes may be there for safety reasons.. but one thing I observed is the anxiety to choose wrongly, and the subsequent road rage when wrong decision was made. Both intoducing to my noob eyes new safety hazards. And then I didn't mention cars that deliberately drive over the ridge.

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