With a roundabout, you only have to look in one direction, and if it’s clear, you don’t even have to stop.
I see people complain about roundabouts with traffics lights and how it negates some of the reasons for the roundabout. The thing is, these aren’t just put in for fun, usually they’re in areas with extremely heavy traffic where merging can get extremely difficult which leads to long backups (or in cities, accidents that can shut down traffic).
Roundabouts can be great when used well, but they’re hardly the silver bullet that online discourse often portrays them as.
I like them, but it is a mistake to blindly install them anywhere possible.
When Cycling and approaching a roundabout move to the middle of the lane and follow the same routes as a car. Yes you slow the cars a bit but they are supposed to be going slowly anyway. If you don't want to do that, you can get off your bike and cross as a pedestrian would.
Maybe you haven't seen the worst ones, then. For instance, one by my house had traffic lines which gave people the wrong impression about the right of way within the roundabout, leading to every vehicle treating driving like that. I actually drove like that as well for a long time - when you're spending every day driving the exact same way that the hundreds of other cars surrounding you are driving, and the lines on the road suggest that it's correct way to drive, it's easy to mistakenly think this is what you're supposed to be doing.
Then it hit me one day - this isn't how right of way works in a roundabout at all. I talked to others in the area, who were surprised when I brought it up. That's what the lines implied, that's what everyone _did_, but that's not how it was supposed to be used. Everyone was driving through this incorrectly. And it was a major roundabout, that had some of the heaviest traffic in the city.
Maybe it didn't matter because everyone was driving incorrectly, which worked most (but not all) of the time? But when it wouldn't, the accident would be a T-bone, so we can't say that roundabouts eliminate those.
Years later someone in the city seemed to realize it, and changed the design of the roundabout. It's better now, but there are still a few areas they overlooked that have the potential to cause accidents.
You seem to have misread my post. Everyone drove wrong. I seemed to be the only one to notice it, and started avoiding that roundabout, because driving with the correct right of way rules during busy times would lead you to t-boning another car. Other people I talked to said "no, that's just how you're supposed to drive on that roundabout" (it wasn't, and the signage was eventually updated many years later).
If _everyone_ is driving through it incorrectly doesn't make it a bad roundabout, than I suppose no roundabout can be bad. If it's always the fault of the drivers and never the design, you can't really say 4 way stops are any worse in this regard either.
I’m trying to say that everyone driving through it incorrectly is not a great metric to judge bad roundabout. If everyone does it wrong and it’s still safer than a regular intersection, then is a success.
Of course I don’t know the numbers involved, so I can’t say if that’s the case here.
Or to visualize it another way - if you can image those intersections where there are two right turn only lanes, and one lane to the left of them that's right turn or go straight. Now imagine if all three lanes were right turn or go straight, and everyone made right turns - but if someone in the far right lane is going straight, they're plowing into the cars turning in the other two lanes.
After years they eventually fixed it and made the two outer circle lanes right turn only, which is what they should have done at the beginning. But even there they screwed up, because there's a street that enters the circle right after the right turn only signs, so if someone is entering from that direction and isn't familiar with the circle it's possible for them to ram into the other cars.
There are variations on this, sometimes, B can only go straight so that C can also go straight. C can also be used for a fully controlled U-turn. In fact, C is has the markings such that one can just go around and around and around forever in if one chose to do so.
All of the roundabouts here have overhead signage leading up to them that indicates which lanes are for each direction of travel. There are also lines on the roads themselves have solid and dashed lines. Never cross solid lines, optionally cross dashes. We get snow so lines aren't always visible.
I've been through many different roundabouts countless times and there is occasionally someone that doesn't get it right but the traffic is moving slowly enough that it unusually only leads to honking.
One strategy is to watch the faces of other drivers, people will be looking in the direction they will be turning.
After the neighbourhood complained, it's now a roundabout with 4 stops (not ideal, but not dangerous either).
The feature that seemed to be missing from the roundabout in the original post was any kind of signage. Normally in the UK, roundabouts have a sort of map view as you approach them, then on the islands are signs telling you where to exit.
I am from the UK and it makes me wonder why road design in the US is so bad. Just one minute of thinking about this as a lay person would reveal the problem with the design.
Is there some structural reason in the US that would cause it? Perhaps some lack of standards or approval process? Perhaps iteration speed is slower so they don’t get better? Some other incentives going on?
No, they don't, at least not in America. When you let American traffic engineers design a roundabout, you get this: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.8643875,-77.2755474,583m/
An actual roundabout DOES solve the tbone issue.
https://osm.org/go/eu8S4TeKc?way=50459468
(right-hand drive)
I think they're a bad design as they encourage drivers to go fast with the sweeping corners etc. Ideally, a roundabout should be designed to slow traffic joining it to reduce collisions and their severity. Trying to keep vehicles moving quickly at junctions is just asking for trouble.
Here's one of my favourite hybrid "roundabout" junctions:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Boughton%20Heath%...
American traffic engineers would apparently disagree with you.
We don’t have four way stops though so instead it’ll be min/maj junction or traffic lights.
It’s extremely common in the Netherlands to replace crossroads and T-junctions with roundabouts to improve safety, but Dutch urban roundabouts are designed with safety as the main priority. This is achieved through single lanes, sharp entries, limiting forward visibility, and pedestrian and cyclist priority (via what are effective zebras).
For more information see eg: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/explaining-the...
(Edit: fixed wrong link)
NL seems to quite commonly have this kind of physically large but medium traffic suburban junction, but outside of Milton Keynes and the outskirts of some towns that got heavily developed in the 60s, it's hard to see many places where we could just drop it in.
> That the Dutch roundabout, including the cycle tracks all around it, can be built in almost the same space of a traditional junction is the reason why so many are being converted.
From: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/junction-desig...
I'm with you on how some will still be dangerous, and can require traffic stops. But it's still better than going back to a plain stops IMHO, and it's usually in portions where it was already dangerous before putting in the roundabout. In practice I've never seen a reversal of a roundabout to get back to a plain intersection.
The number of bad roundabouts is pretty common here, though. But it wouldn't entirely surprise me (based on other things I've seen) if there was a level of local incompetence that went beyond the norm. You're right that they can be improved, but (I mentioned this in another reply), sometimes that takes years or decades for whatever reason (and even then, they don't fix all of the issues).
Roundabouts are great sometimes, but they aren’t a magic bullet.
That said we have a nasty intersection in the area on a highway that they’re going to redo, which absolutely no one could have foreseen 10 years ago when they first put it in.
The 3 options were j-turn or roundabout soon, or a full on overpass type system in another 10 years.
J-turns are awful, so while that was their first idea it was thankfully put down. It would have been even worse as it leads into a school and most buses in the area would have needed to do U-turns on the highway, as well as new teen drivers. In Minnesota.
Old people complained about roundabouts because even though they’re used quite a bit in the area apparently they don’t drive and don’t understand them.
So, 10+ million dollar overpass for a town of 2,000 it is, in 10 years. Let’s hope not too many more people die before then, eh?
Yes, that is by design. Slowing traffic down, also in relatively low-traffic areas, is one of the use-cases for roundabouts in France. Mostly around villages and/or industrial areas.
If you think roundabouts slow you down (they don't really), just wait until non-rush hour at one of these "roundabouts" when you're the only car waiting on several sets of red lights, or during rush hour when the lights have failed and it's totally gridlocked where traffic simply cannot pass.
All four way stops are badly designed. Roundabouts are not always the best options, but they're always better than four ways stops.
No matter how terribly designed, it's hard to entirely miss a roundabout. You basically need to be incoherent.
IMO all smaller 4 way stops should become what I've described as trash can roundabouts. Small island to circle around. So much better than stop signs.
And it rarely snows in the UK these days. And I would hope you would be driving extremely cautiously if there were snow on the ground (in the UK) as it's such a rare event.
Roundabouts are engrained into UK road culture, you'd seldom find a driver in the UK that cant figure out how one works, even if they may not have great lane discipline on the larger ones.
That said, I agree with your points, and I personally prefer roundabouts to queuing stops. They flow so much better, and really help to improve congestion/bottlenecking.
I think COVID really kicked the enshittification of drivers here into a new realm. That spat where driving tests were suspended in so many places and driving school wasn't workable has let a couple years worth of drivers onto the road who had almost no practical instruction, and it fucking shows. And it's not like most people were good before that. For the vast majority, driving is a chore and you can tell that by the absolutely bare-minimum efforts put into it.
When being taught how to ride a motorcycle, one of the lessons is a series of extra checks that you're not taught when learning to drive a car. These are known as lifesaver checks.
Entering a roundabout is a left turn in Ireland (right turn in right hand drive countries) so you would check over your left shoulder to make sure nothing was on your left. This is performed after doing a normal right and ahead check for traffic already on the roundabout.
I have never caught anything with a roundabout lifesaver (I have in other situations) but I can see how it's useful on roundabouts with multiple entry lanes, or if something like a bicycle had appeared on your right.
I suspect there isn't enough room for a roundabout, and we also don't tend to construct roundabouts on hills (I'm not sure why they're any worse than other junctions there). There's a steep gradient going uphill from South to North.
Normally it would be a two way stop, and I sometimes wonder why that wasn't chosen here. Likely because visibility is bad (trees, walls, curves - it's worse than it looks in the satellite image) and cars coming from the east and west can't completely tell that it's safe to enter the junction.
The other side may have a stop sign, but are they stopping?
Its sort of useless to know if you have the right of way or not when you drive defensively. Just assume you don't and only go if you actually see someone yielding/preparing to yield to you.
Too many people remain at the stop sign until the roundabout completely clears, so it becomes an excruciatingly slow 4-way stop. And there's not much traffic there.
A few miles from that one, there's a high traffic roundabout that works very well. The heavily used right turn lanes are divided and don't enter the roundabout. There are very clear markings on the ground. And there are yield signs at the entrances, so people know what to do. Traffic flows great through it, with the heaviest direction of travel naturally getting more throughput.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7004641,-120.976448,3a,75y,1...
So, if you were making a sarcastic joke: then yup, they managed to convert a round about into a 4-way stop with a (giant, view obstructing) island. But if you were arguing that no one would do such a thing as put stop signs at the entrances to a round about, I regret to inform you that they absolutely would.
Also, I'm now curious about the existence of "4-way stop with an island". Why would someone build that? It seems strictly worse than a regular 4 way stop.
Your state is doing it wrong then. Almost every four way stop I've ever seen in the US has a little sign beneath the big octagon which says "4-way".
Anyways, I have nothing against roundabouts. But I do have issue with some states (looking at you, Wisconsin) which are obsessed with tearing out perfectly good stop signs (as in, it's a low volume intersection or it's only a two way stop with a highway going through) and replacing them with roundabouts. It's just a waste of taxpayer money.
That being said that looks like a pretty decent and standard setup for a set of roundabouts, certainly wouldn't look out of place in the UK and would be vastly superior to a whole host of stop signs and red lights. It probably could've been simplified slightly by turning the two middle ones into one long oval roundabout, those are pretty common on motorway junctions in the UK.
The Beaconsfield junction on the M40 is a randomly selected example of this very setup in the U.K.: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/51.59432/-0.62779
Or the junction of the A5 and the A442 in Telford: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/52.67883/-2.43871