I spend some time looking at this link to the Swindon magic roundabout, and I’m confused.
I’ve used roundabouts and traffic circles rather a lot in the US; they’re neither mysterious nor confusing to me.
I know it’s meant for driving on the left UK-style, so I had to trace the movements carefully to counter my own drive-on-the-right bias, but I still don’t see the point.
It appears that if I’m entering and want to exit at the normal next opportunity, ie to the left or clockwise, I can do that as per a typical roundabout. And I can continue to do that passing several spokes, again like a normal roundabout. This maneuver/maneouvre would keep me to the outside of the oblong islands.
But if my desired exit is past 180 degress around the outer circle from my entry point, I could take a “shortcut” by entering, then using the mini-roundabout to my right to enter the inner circle going anti-/counter-clockwise, and then use the next mini roundabout to exit to my desired spoke.
Finally, I can use each mini-roundabout by itself to easily reverse direction if I’m coming in on a spoke and wish to exit on the same spoke.
I see all those possibilities, but I’ll be damned if I understand how the gain in complexity gives any benefit. Unless for some strange reason the Swindon traffic at this point has lots of people who wish to exit at a road to the right of the one they entered.
Local Brits, please help me see the point.
p.s. Even if pointless, it’s a way cool invention. I’d love to see one installed here (provided I owned the nearest car body repair shop or towing company!!)
Ah yes, the Arc - certainly not a roundabout, just a case of the French being ‘a bit fucking French’ (Eddie Izzard). I’m pretty sure that the right-of-way thing is now an anomaly, with ordinary French roundabouts working in the ‘usual’ manner.
I’m aware of three with a three-hour drive of here:
In Dublin, Ohio, at the intersection of Brand Road and Muirfield Drive. This is a new roundabout, is designed well, and seems towork well.
In the centre of Somerset, Ohio, at the intersection of US 22 and State Route 13. This is a roundabout because there is is a statue in the middle of it. I driven through it once, and no one there seemede to know how to drive through a roundabout,
In the centre of Indianapolis, Monument Circle, where Meridian Street (N and S) meets Market Street (E and W). Again, it’s a roundabout because there’s a monument in the centre. Although it’s in the centre of a large city, the traffic is relatively light, and it seems to work fairly well, with no traffic lights. (Every intersection near it has traffic lights, and has heavier traffic).
There’s a website somewhere that explains the history of this junction - systems using lights, or a single large roundabout, didn’t provide the necessary capacity, and using more land wasn’t feasible. The magic roundabout actually can deal with more cars than the other more obvious options. And, all things being equal, half of all drivers will want to be taking the third or fourth exit around, i.e. equal numbers will be turning right as will be turning left.
Oh, one more thing about the Swindon one - it’s far less confusing at street level than it seems from the aerial view! All you see in front of you is one roundabout at a time.
Not completely remodelled - in fact I believe the roundabout hasn’t changed. However, there are now flyovers for people going from London to Stansted, or Stansted to London. As I am doing the Cambridge -> Stansted journey, it’s no good to me :rolleyes:
As you can see from this map, someone coming from the North gets on the big roundabout, takes the first left onto Thremhall Avenue, turns right at the next roundabout and disappears off to Stansted along the white road. When returning, they come back to the big roundabout the same way, but have to go all the way around it (the other circle, not the inner one).
I’ve learned that if you sit waiting to get on it at the front of the queue and your light goes green, if you whizz round at top speed, keeping an eye on which lane you should be in (it does the spiral thing mentioned earlier), and you don’t get held up by someone slow in front of you, it’s actually possible to get round without getting stopped by one of the other traffic lights. Just.
You can see the two slip roads that make it easier for travellers to and from London, too. I wish Google Maps UK had an aerial view thing.
There are a number of traffic circles in New Jersey, and for the most part they work. There are two exceptions to this rule, however, of which I’m aware.
The Brunswick Circle between Trenton and Lawrenceville. To all appearances (at least the aerial ones) it is a perfectly ordinary and functional traffic circle. What the photo doesn’t show is that the traffic in the circle is supposed to yield to the traffic entering the circle from southbound Brunswick Avenue (the major road entering the northeast sector of the circle). I think it is evident that this often results in a snarl during rush hour. The whole point of a circle is that the feeder roads are supposed to absorb the heavy traffic, keeping the circle flowing.
Than there’s this intersection in Hamilton Township. It’s where South Broad Street (Route 206) and Whitehorse-Mercerville Road come together. Again, it’s very deceptive based on the photo; it doesn’t look that bad. And, I think they improved it once the I-195 work was finished. When I was growing up, however, it was hell. It seemed like a traffic circle that successive generations of civil engineers had tried to “improve” by carving shortcuts through the middle. I almost died there no fewer than three times.
They used to have traffic circles in New Jersey, where I grew up. They’ve mostly replaced them with more conventional intersections. In DC they’ve tamed the traffic circles by putting lights all around them, putting in inner and outer rings, and diverting some traffic under them.
But New England has a lot of real, anarchic ones, which (as noted above) they call “rotaries”. I think they’re the only place that does. They’ve gotten rid of a few (like the infamous Howard Johnson’s Rotary on Route 1 in Saugus), but there are plenty of others.
The rukle is supposed to be that traffic goes around counter-clockwise, that you’re supposed to stop at a circle, then enter, with folks in the circle having the right of way. But some circles – especially the small ones (and Boston and environs have some unbelievably tiny rotaries) – in which a major route goes through are treated as if the major route always has the Right of Way, and anyone trying to get onto that major thoroughfare, even if on the Rotary, has to yield. There are a couple on the Fellsway in Malden like this.
Other people dimly recall their driving instructors saying that the person on the right at an intyersection has the Right of Way, and figure that anyone entering a rotary is always on the right, and therefore has the Right of Way.
In truth, driving on Rotaries in New England is darwinian struggle at its most raw. Survival of the Fittest.
I was delighted when I drove on the roadways in the UK and Ireland. Even though I was driving on (what was to me) the Wrong Side of the Road, and the traffic went the “wrong” way ariound the circles, at least people really did obey the traffic laws at those circles.
I don’t know if it’s a circle or a roundabout, but it ends up operating as though there were traffic lights controlling it. The breaks in traffic allowing people to enter seem to rotate around the circle so that at any time only vehicles on one road are actually progressing onto the circle. The rest are stopped until the break in traffic gets around to their side, at which point a bunch of cars will access all at once. It causes a lot of backups in heavy traffic.
Another fun feature is that the upper right road accessing the circle is an on/off ramp to the thruway, I90, which is a toll highway, so if you accidentally get off on that road you have to drive down the highway to the next exit where you must pay a toll.
To echo what Antonius Block said, there are plenty of traffic circles in Washington, but they are all strictly controlled by combinations of traffic signals and stop signs.
They’re extremely dangerous and in my opinion do nothing to assist the flow of traffic. They just confuse people.
I heard that the Washington circles were created so that speeding horse carriages wouldn’t have to make sharp turns on the muddy roads.
By the way, American traffic circles go anti-clockwise.
Here’s your map/photo combo…
After driving in GB recently, I can say that traffic in Canada/US is tremendously slower due to the lack of roundabouts. I rarely had to come to a complete stop while we were there. I loved the motorway roundabouts/circles as it made it very easy to easily recover from an incorrect exit.
A couple of years ago we experienced a triple roundabout in Edinburgh, but I think it got replaced by a complicated set of traffic lights.
Roundabouts would be a nightmare to introduce here (to replace 4-way stops) as people wouldn’t bother to find out how to use them correctly and end up increasing insurance premiums everywhere…
There are a couple of intersections near where I live that should be changed to roundabouts. They are 3-way intersections, where each of the 3 roads has a similar amount of traffic, and there’s not enough traffic for lights. At present, each has a “Yield” sign on one of the roads, and in both cases I think it’s a pretty arbitrary decision which of the 3 roads was chosen.
Roundabouts in Ontario. The linked site has a webcam of the Ancaster Roundabout on Highway 2 in Ancaster (part of Hamilton, Ontario). The site also has description and photographs of roundabouts in the area (although, oddly, not the one in Swansea, which is fun to go around on the Swansea bus. ) Note the odd variety of the signage in the last link. Some of them do not match the usual Canadian style of fonts and arrows, and look quite UKish at times.
Those are for “traffic calming” - an attempt to actually slow down traffic by preventing people from speeding down long straight streets. In other words, they are utterly contrary to the purpose of a traffic circle, rotary or roundabout.
That one’s interesting - the original layout looks very much like an America traffic circle. DC & New England Dopers - start campaigning for your monolithic junctions to become magic roundabouts!
I used to live in Dupont Circle and absolutely hated driving through it. I now live in rural southern Maryland and we have a small roundabout that everyone loves (on route 2 for those in the know). Much faster than a traffic light and much safer than the monstrous circles in DC.
) Note the odd variety of the signage in the last link. Some of them do not match the usual Canadian style of fonts and arrows, and look quite UKish at times.