In my area of London the streets are old and there is not enough space for a regular roundabout at an intersection. Instead there is a road hazard known as a mini roundabout. The central part is big more than a few feet across and slightly raised, but you can easily drive over it. Sadly drivers often do this instead of stopping to yeild and there are frequent accidents. The roundabout concept does not scale down safely. They are very efficient and safe where many roads meet at one place. European cities are very old and the streets often narrow and they are not laid out in grids like in the US.
One of the must sees in Paris is to watch the cars bump into each other on large roundabouts. You might also be entertained by the way they park cars up against each other. When a car is boxed in they will just bump the car in front and reverse and bump the car to the rear until there is enough space to get out. The French do not have much respect for other people’s cars or any other road user who gets in their way. Least of all pedestrians.
We have mini-roundabouts in the US too. But in general, the raised part in the middle is less friendly towards driving over than what you describe. And definitely not the kind where they just paint a 2-foot white dot with some arrows around it in the middle of an intersection and expect everyone to treat that dot as a no-go zone.
But my impression of continental-style vs British was that it applied to regular roundabouts, not minis.
This is one of those cases where technical people (i.e. traffic engineers) use terms differently than your ordinary people. Traffic circle is used as a generic term for all circular intersections. Rotaries are a type of large circles that were developed in the 1930s and were the main reason traffic circles fell out of favor in the 50s. Roundabouts is short for the modern roundabout and refers to only those with certain characteristics that distinguish them from rotaries. There’s also traffic calming circles, also called neighborhood circles, that are mainly put in to keep people from speeding on residential streets. I wrote a blog post as guest author about the history/distinction of traffic circles:
As far as that video, it’s pretty good, although the count of the number of roundabouts in the US is understandably out of date. The numbers for France and UK are probably low too. There’s one or two minor errors, but they don’t detract much.
To be fair, the writer of the lyrics was smoking weed while riding in the back of a van, looking out the window at the mountains and lakes. We’re fortunate that all he described was that they were standing there.
In France there is a phenomenon called priorité à droite where the car approaching from the right has the right-of-way, at uncontrolled intersections. (This is similar to the rule about yielding to the right at a four-way-stop in the U.S., but this rule applies when there is no Stop sign.) There are now generally signs indicating when this is in effect, though in rural areas with no signs it would be smart to assume it applies. If this were to apply to a roundabout then the traffic entering would have the ROW but that was not my experience when I drove in France (Toulouse area) about three years ago.
