Well of course you know which exit you want: the signs before the roundabout tell you, and there are usually markings on the road telling you which lane to be in.
What if I’m following directions, or just looking, based on landmarks rather than road names?
There will be a sign like this (or maybe this if youre in America) on the approach to the roundabout. If you know you want Town A or Road X then you can see from the diagram (a) which exit it is, and (b) where on the roundabout it is located. If you’re following directions they will say something like “take the third exit at the roundabout”. So it’s not hard to choose the correct lane.
At a normal intersection, you don’t suddenly veer off to take a turning without warning, do you? So it’s reasonable to assume you know which way you’re heading.
Real-life example: “turn off after you pass the McDonald’s.”
This is a trivially easy direction to follow with conventional intersections, or by intuitively applying the same yielding logic to a circle, but it doesn’t work with CoastalMaineiac’s rules if I can’t see the McDonald’s far enough in advance of entering the circle that I can position myself in the appropriate lane.
No one sane is going to give you directions that require noticing a McDonalds half-way through a traffic circle.
That was a real-life example, and in real life, in fact, it worked perfectly–just as well as it would have with conventional intersections–because in that area, AFAICT, nobody was following anything resembling CoastalMaineiac’s rules. Both lanes in the circle were continuous, if you wanted them to be; you could go around and around without being required or prohibited from any exit based on your point of entry. A right-turner from the left (inner, in the US) lane of the circle certainly would not expect traffic established in the right (outer) lane to yield to him, as K364 said.
This is probably the nearest roundabout to my house and the one I go round most often. No, they haven’t repainted the lane markings lately. There *are *twenty lanes coming on or off, you just can’t see them!
You can go round and round all you want as long as you do so from the inside lane. A general rule of thumb I follow if I’m not sure of which exit I want is to take the inside lane. If it turns out that my exit was less than halfway around, then I just do an extra lap and get off. Really not that difficult of a situation. One thing about a rotary, it’s no big deal if you miss your turn; you’ll come up on it again quickly enough.
The right-hand lane does not have a right to continue around the rotary indefinitely, preventing people from exiting the inside lanes.
There’s a two-lane rotary in Augusta that used to be striped the way you described, people still drove it like the diagram I linked showed. Multi-lane circle + multi-lane exits = multiple lanes exiting side by side. In that situation, proper lane discipline is rather important.
Just noticed it’s a five-year-old zombie. Never mind…
As I said above when K364 said a similar thing, this is counter-intuitive. When I’m using a freeway on-ramp, there’s no rule to never pull alongside a car in the left lane. When I’m driving down a regular road in the right lane, I don’t have to yield to the person in the left lane who wants to make a right turn across my lane. Do you have a cite for these two rules?
In the image you linked to, it looks all nice and orderly, but if you rotate the blue path 90 degrees CCW, so the car is coming from the right, its path crosses the red path, which is a recipe for accidents. In the OP’s case*, this sort of path never happens. We have some multi-lane traffic circles near me, and they all also seem to be set up so that these crossing paths don’t occur. Either the right lane must exit, or the inner lane can’t, or both.
The circles near me were all made in the last 5 or so years, so maybe designs have progressed to where they avoid setting up these crossings.
- Was it like this five years ago, Napier, or have they restriped it since your OP?
That’s the specific statute here.
This concept is not limited to Maine either.
In terms of the path crossing example you gave, the paths don’t necessarily cross. If they both went at the same time, they’d be out of each other’s way the whole time. If there’s a conflict, the one who is entering is supposed to yield to all traffic already in the circle (well, those close enough to cause a conflict), regardless of which lane they’re in.