Its one of those that seem more complicated than they are. I know for sure that when I’m driving in the USA I find myself so many times, sitting in a line of traffic while empty lanes are given a green light thinking “why the hell is this not a roundabout?”.
I never find myself thinking vice-versa.
The Missouri Department of Transportation has converted a number of interchanges to “diverging diamond interchange”. Here’s a video of how they work.
I’m familiar with the one at I-435 and Roe in Overland Park, KS. At first it was shocking, but it works wonderfully well.Here’s a Google Maps overview of it.
I’m going to guess that you grew up (and more importantly, learned to drive) in the UK, or somewhere else where roundabouts were common. And, thus, to you, roundabouts have always been a part of driving, and the logic of “how to navigate a roundabout” was just part of what you learned when you learned to drive.
In a lot of (probably most of) the U.S., that hasn’t been the case, and roundabouts were, in the past, somewhere between “rare” and “non-existent.” But, in a number of areas, over the past decade or two, traffic engineers have decided that roundabouts are a great way to make traffic flow more smoothly.
Which, I’ll concede, makes sense…if the drivers who go through them know how to use them. The traffic engineers in the area where I grew up (Green Bay, WI) have gone bonkers for roundabouts in the last 10-15 years. And, every time i go up there, I see people who drive through them extremely hesitantly, or don’t understand that they need to yield to traffic that’s already in the roundabout, or even insist on going through them the wrong way (i.e., clockwise), because “I want to turn left, not right!”
All of that is, I’m convinced, the result of imposing a new road feature on a driving population who never had to deal with it before, most of whom have decades of ingrained habits in their driving, and who had never received (and still have not gotten) actual, hands-on instruction on how to navigate roundabouts.
And that, I’m pretty sure, is why you hear Americans complaining about roundabouts.
No light rail, but here’s one with an expressway thru the middle:
That one’s actually not a roundabout, but rather a rotary. There is a technical distinction between those two things[sup]1[/sup], although freeway is not a factor in distinguishing them. That is, there are roundabouts that go across or under freeways. More common though, is an interchange having two roundabouts, one on either side of the freeway and the on- and offramps going to them.
[sup]1[/sup] The biggest difference is who yields when vehicles want to enter the circle. Other differences are what speeds the traffic circulates at and the size of the circle.
We have roundabouts where I live. The written rules are as yours, but cars still race into the roundabout, so those already in need to slow or stop. :smack: Still, I don’t recall an accident in a roundabout; and we almost lead the world in traffic accidents!
Google doesn’t show the Positively Front Street bar&grill with its Thursday evening backgammon club several decades ago. Did it go out of business?
For that matter, I don’t remember that roundabout. Is it new?
But, but…* they act as traffic calming devices*!!!:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
:rolleyes:
Built in 2015
Here are more roundabouts with rail lines through them:
There’s more.
One in Fort Wayne. It was just built this year and the Streetview car hasn’t gone through it yet. But the tracks go smack through the center.
Three of them in Saint-Herblain, France with a tram line running through them: first second third
Near the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.
There’s more, but that should be enough.
I wonder if they have a lot of tourists/out of towners that approach that, and just stop in the middle of the road trying to figure out what the hell to do. Because I’m pretty sure that’s what I would do if I approached that thing without already knowing it was there and having taken the necessary three week correspondence course on how to navigate it.
A straightforward roundabout is fine and pretty sure it’s better than a normal intersection, but THAT complicated thing? It’s confusing enough when viewed from above, when viewed from ground level, I’d be totally lost.