See here in RSA we drive on the left hand side of the road and yield to the right on a traffic circle. This seem illogical and Iw as just wondering whether countries that drive on the right hand side also yield to the right or whether they yield to the left.
This shouldnt take long.
Thanx
-Andrew V
There’s only one traffic circle in my city (they’re fairly rare in the USA altogether) and I haven’t been brave enough to try it. But I’ve been told to look over my LEFT shoulder, because I’ll be merging toward the right. If someone is coming from the left, I’ll yield.
Hmm… now I know how to amuse myself this weekend.
One generally yields to moving traffic. In the case of traffic circles (which aren’t that common for cars in the US), one always yields to the traffic in the circle, in other words, to the cars on the left if you drive on the right, to cars on the right if you drive on the left.
In the US, at intersections with multiple stop signs (a.k.a. 4-way or All-way stops), cars are supposed to cross the junction in the order that they arrived and stopped. If one appears to ‘tie’ with another car, the vehicle on the right conventionally has the right of way.
There are a few traffic circles at Michigan State University. The traffic moves counter-clockwise in them, so you yield to vehicles coming from the left.
Traffic circles are very rare in the US. Most of them are in older, Eastern cities. I have seen numerous people yield to EVERYONE, simply stopping in utter confusion. I think there’s just a couple in the state of Illinois. In Madison, Wisconson, they’ve created a couple of “traffic circles” simply by putting huge planters on the middle of a fourway intersection, to slow traffic down in residential neighborhoods.
We travel counter clockwise around our circles. When entering the circle, we yield to traffic already in the circle coming from our left.
Washington, DC (my former home) has quite a lot of circles. Several of them have been tunnelled under, so the main intersecting street can go straight through on an underpass. Others are “optimised” for the main street passing through them, ie, driving on that road is more like going through a S curve. The street is more tangent than spoke to the “wheel” of the circle.
Just to reiterate again redundantly… The traffic entering always yields right-of-way. There’re a few merges in NYC where you merge into the left lane of a multi-lane road, and in these instances, you always yield to the cars on your right (unless you’re a yellow taxi or gypsy cab).
The California Vehicle Code and the handbook the DMV gives out here don’t even mention traffic circles or rotaries or roundabouts (take your pick).
Long Beach has a very busy one.
The news story I read about it said that traffic planners in California liked traffic circles because while they did not eliminate accidents, the ones that did occur would not be as catastrophic. You might bump into someone, but you will likely be going slowly and it’s not like running a red light at 40 mph and hitting someone broadside.
From what I can tell, in California, the rule to follow is that the people already in the circle have the right of way and anyone entering it from a cross-street must yield to the person already in it.
It’s sort of like getting on the freeway. Just smaller and slower.
Traffic approaching the circle must yield to traffic already on the circle.
I live in the circle district in Washington DC, and for some reason they have seen fit to festoon all the circles with traffic lights, so there is very little need for one to have to make such a decision.
I think circles were designed into cities to help keep traffic moving semi-smoothly where several busy streets intersect, eliminating the need for a complicated intersection with numerous traffic signals. Why we planted three dozen signal lights on each circle is beyond me.
Traffic circles seem to be more common in New England and the Boston area in particular than they are in other parts of the US, although they call them rotaries. Cars already in the circle have the right of way unless otherwise indicated, but your average Boston driver seems to be as clueless about this as they are about all the other rules of the road. I drive through several rotaries each day on my way to and from work and often see people driving straight in when they are supposed to yield, and also yielding when they have the right of way, which is equally dangerous in my view.
The problem with several of the rotaries I drive through is that they work best when the number of cars is more or less even on all the entrances and exits to the rotary, but in real life usually 90% of the cars are coming into the rotary at one particular point and 90% are leaving at another particular point. These intersections should probably be redesigned to catch up with reality.
I don’t have a cite but have seen in several newspaper articles on the subject that the rules of the road in some New England states used to be different in that cars had to yield to cars that were “getting underway”, so at a rotary the cars in the rotary would have to yield to cars entering the rotary. This seems counterintuitive to me, and in any case this hasn’t been the rule anywhere in New England for at least 30 years.
I grew up just outside Boston, so I’ve spent my share of time in and around rotaries. The rule in MA and NH has always been cars in the rotary have right of way; you always yield upon entering a rotary.
This leads to major problems at places like the Rt 2 rotary in Concord MA. You have a major divided highway going into a rotary where 90% of the traffic is just going straight through and out the other side. Most traffic continuing on Rt 2 doesn’t yield, which causes no end of grief.
Really? Where? I’ve never seen any.
I live not too far from the Long Beach traffic circle that BobT mentioned, and negotiatied it today, as a matter of fact. Despite the fairly clear signs on all approaches telling incoming traffic to yield to that in the circle, it’s often pretty chaotic. ‘Bout half the time I go through it, somebody is honkin’ at somebody over some misdeed, real or imagined.
There are four “spokes” to this circle: two streets terminate there, and the Pacific Coast Highway (here just a large surface street) passes through. The PCH is set up as (sort of) a tangent to the circle, like yojimboguy describes.
If you’re southbound (actually headed due east here, but who’s counting) on the PCH into the circle, the far right lane is set aside for those continuing directly out on the other PCH leg. It’s a marked-off lane on the outer edge of the circle, and you don’t have to yield to the whirligig traffic - you can just putter along and stay on the same road.
As I found out today, though, all this really does is delay the hectic merge, as your dedicated lane ends only a few feet after you leave the circle, so you have to quickly merge to the left back into that traffic you just gleefully escaped.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other traffic circles in southern California.