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Comment by avgDev | Hacker News Reader

Reading this reminded me of US stop signs, which are just terrible for traffic and fuel efficiency. I recently went to Europe, and round abouts started feeling "right" so fast I was amazed.

Do civil engineers not learn these things in schools in the US? Is efficiency not considered? So many questions.

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Roundabouts are occasionally used in the US, but they are not a panacea. They require much more space than conventional intersections, and can't easily be converted to traffic lights. It's also difficult for visually impaired people to navigate roundabouts, so it can be hard to be ADA-compliant.

The Department of Transportation published a study about 20 years ago about roundabouts [1]; I'm sure most American Civil Engineers doing road design are familiar with it.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/00068/

> It's also difficult for visually impaired people to navigate roundabouts, so it can be hard to be ADA-compliant.

So how do the they deal with this aspect in the EU countries?

Detectable warning surfaces, pedestrian signals, bigger pedestrian refuges are options. There's also a familiarity problem; a guide dog in the US might have never seen a roundabout before and get confused, which is less likely in a country with many roundabouts.

By not having the ADA.

They don't have the equivalent of the ADA?

Sort of. The EU ratified the UN's officiously-titled Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2010, but actual disability access comes down to local laws. Only some EU members implement the standards, and they usually apply only to new buildings. In practice, disability access in Europe is terrible: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/traveling-wi... I'm not disabled, but even my cursory observation noticed how bad it is. There are millions of wide gaps, high curbs, and narrow staircases with no other accessibility options. Last time I visited the British Museum, several of the few lifts they did have were broken with no workaround. And that's one of the more accessible places. Problems with roundabouts barely even make the list.

UK has decent disability law that I’m sure is comparable to the US’s, where both have exceptions for difficult to adapt buildings. Whether that be the protected and iconic British Museum or the hundred year old Tube stations.

The problem is that a much, much higher percentage of the UK fits under protected, iconic, or difficult to adapt.

So does a large part of older US infrastructure. Imagine trying to navigate the NYC subways in a wheelchair.

They have some accessibility laws, especially more recently, but the ADA is an extreme outlier in the western world in terms of how demanding accessibility requirements are.

They are fairly common in Massachusetts where they are called rotaries, which to me is much better than roundabout.

Some more recent signage uses the incredibly sterile and clunky "traffic circle," and I guess I would take roundabout over that if I had to.

All the same thing, just different names. I don't see them often outside the northeast though.

Traffic circles have different design specs than rotaries. It isn't an arbitrary naming difference.

Within traffic engineering there is a distinction between a "rotary" and a "roundabout" [1]. In Massachusetts, every circle-like configuration is called a "rotary" because...

A. Most of them actually are rotaries.

B. The average person is not aware of the distinction.

[1] http://calmstreetsboston.blogspot.com/2012/04/rotaries-vs-ro...

There are not different names for different kinds of roundabout in Britain (except for really small mini roundabouts)

Fascinating! I stand by my point about language aesthetics though.

Roundabouts are making a comeback.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-03/rounda...

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