Posted on 06/02/2021 2:57:39 AM PDT by Kaslin
I hate waiting at traffic lights.
There's a solution: traffic circles, or roundabouts.
Traffic circles terrified me when I first confronted them in Europe. A movie, National Lampoon?s European Vacation, captured my experience when it portrayed Chevy Chase driving in London, unable to exit a rotary all day.
Besides being hard to navigate, I also assumed roundabouts cause problems, but a Freakanomics podcast woke me to their advantages. Roundabouts are a reason Britain?s rate of traffic deaths is less than half the U.S.'s.
We've converted almost all of our traffic lights to roundabouts because we save lives,? says the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, Jim Brainard. His little town now has 133 roundabouts.
A University of Wisconsin-Madison study confirmed that roundabouts save lives. Roundabouts increased crashes a bit, but deaths and injuries dropped by 38 percent.
It's because of the angle of the cars, says Brainard. Instead of a T-bone, you got a sideswipe?
Roundabouts also slow cars down a little, giving drivers more time to react.
That makes it seem like it'll take longer for cars to get through intersections, I say to Brainard.
It really doesn't, he responds. A roundabout moves 50 percent more traffic than a traffic light.
More than a four-way stop sign intersection, too, according to a test ran by the TV show Mythbusters.
Roundabouts are also better for the environment. You never come to a complete stop, Brainard points out. Tremendous amounts of fuel are saved.
Indianapolis realtor Jason Compton says roundabouts even increase the value of homes ?because they just flat out look better (by adding) more green space.
Sometimes communities put artwork in the middle.
Bottom line: Roundabouts are safer, cost less, move more traffic and are better for the environment.
Yet, most Americans still say, I don?t want these things. I tell Brainard. They're confusing. I'm more likely to have an accident!
Well, it takes public education, he responds. Chevy Chase didn't do us any favors.?
Brainard points out that Chase was stuck in a large rotary, not a roundabout. Some traffic circles and rotaries have many lanes. The one by Paris? Arc De Triomphe connects 12 roads!
Those are dangerous, says Brainard. That's not what we're building. Modern roundabouts are small; the smaller they are, the safer they become. They're very different.
Europe learned that lesson. European countries are building lots of small roundabouts.
America is way behind, I tell Brainard.
America is catching up, he replies. When I started, we probably had under a couple of hundred in the United States. Today, we're pushing five or six thousand.
That's progress.
Still, his little town, with just 97,000 residents, has 2 percent of all the roundabouts in America.
I wonder how a self-driving car would handle that intersection?
I was going to link to the same but figured I’d scroll down first!
I was also going to point out that New Jersey has always had traffic circles and jug-handles. Learn to drive in Jersey City and you can drive anywhere!
Yep, I remember as a teenager in Southbridge, our cruise down Main Street started at the west end of the rotary (called “Felix” because of a statue in the middle of somebody named Felix Gatineau), and went about a mile and a half to the rotary down by the “Hay Ho” (old American Optical Company).
Roundabouts are only workable if the drivers are civil and considerate with each other and obey the traffic code. But if drivers were civil and considerate and obeyed the traffic code, yield signs would be sufficient and stop signs would be excessive.
But people aren’t civil, aren’t considerate, and don’t obey the traffic code, ergo ... stoplights.
They take a lot more space. Developers won’t like it. Can’t shove as many buildings onto the same space. Cha-ching.
Lol. In America the slower drivers all get in the left lane.
I hated “roundabouts” when I was driving in Europe during my 2 tours in Germany and I hate them here in the US as well.
As long as you have 2 lanes to the roundabouts they work. If they only have 1, they are defective.
Also, most folk don’t know how to use the damn things. We have a couple around here, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been stuck behind a moron who couldn’t figure out when to enter it.
That modeling vid was cool. Some of the designs looked really confusing. Also noticed that in some of the examples, an ambulance passed right through several vehicles. :-)
That image (The Magic Roundabout) is in Swindon, about an hours drive from where I live. I’ve travelled through it a few times and it’s not as bad as it looks.
By coincidence I was chatting to someone a few weeks ago - an ex-police officer. He told me that when it opened (50 years ago) he was on duty to deal with all the minor road accidents on it - and there were some. No one had really experienced anything quite like it in England before.
True.
West Roxbury Parkway in Boston is the Worst. One Rotary after another.
Try the one at the end of the Champs Élysées that goes around the Arc de Triomphe while keeping the right-of-way rule (entering traffic has it) in mind...that’ll cure you right quick.
Plus, if there is heavy traffic, you can be stuck in a queue forever.
Animations here:
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/brilliant-sorcery-englands-7-circle-magic-roundabout/
If you order two cups of tea and a glass of ice, they get really pissed when you pour the hot tea into the ice.
I was taught the metric system in during 3rd grade in the 70’s because America was going to be all metric before 1980.
I wish it would have taken hold. The Metric system is by far superior and the way God intended measurements to work.
Iced tea is a Southern delicacy, a sign of civilization come home. I’m about to start the process to make a quart of Death Wish coffee for making iced coffee with french vanilla creamer and milk. In the deep South I woulod be considered a heretic, like among Cajuns.
One of my best buddies is a Scouser (that means from Liverpool for those not from the UK) and he said he had driven it many times, and like you said was not that bad.
But it still makes a great photo for those that have never seen it.
“Easy peasy:”
I guess you haven’t priced out new shocks lately.
Not necessarily.
I’ve checked with several websites, and they all say generally the same thing as this one. It has to do with the size of the circular part, and not necessarily how many lanes.
https://calmstreetsboston.blogspot.com/2012/04/rotaries-vs-roundabouts.html
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