It shouldn’t be that difficult to learn: unless otherwise posted, yield to traffic within the circle. There ya go. If the residents of Swindon, England, can figure out the Swindon Magic Roundabout, I’m sure our populace can figure out a simple roundabout. It’s a bit of a chicken-egg problem, though. Folks don’t know how to handle roundabouts because they aren’t very many in most parts of the US. Most of the US doesn’t have roundabouts because people don’t know how to navigate them. Put an average American driver in a European city for a few days, and eventually they will figure it out.
Makkinga in the Netherlands. The concept is called shared space.
I wonder if that will last, or if it some variation on the observer effect. In other words, the drivers know their town is “special” so take extra care to drive carefully. Once the novelty wears off or everyone is doing it, I wonder if the accident rate will creep back up.
You’re supposed to “know” because it’s so common (here). That’s why it’s so very dangerous, for those of us coming from places where “no sign” equals “right of way.”
But isn’t that because yield signs are routinely ignored? And aren’t they ignored because we also have stop signs? If we only had yield signs, people would have to pay attention to them.
A lot of people already treat stop signs as yield signs… Slow, look, and full stop only if traffic demands it. So why shouldn’t the sign conform to practice?
Sacramento, CA yield signs where you normally see stops
It’s always assumed that you have right of way if there’s no sign? That’s strange…
There are many intersections without signs in Germany, but there you have to yield to the right. If a major road crosses a minor road, there are yield signs on the minor and right of way signs on the major road.
Here’s a traffic engineering thing on installing stop vs. yield signs. [PDF]
Here’s a typical roundabout just down the road from where I live. Each entering road has a Give Way (Yield) sign, so traffic entering gives way to traffic already on. The main disadvantage with these, and where they eventually end up having traffic lights, is if one of the ‘straight through’ roads has high traffic flows compared to the other roads. It makes it hard for traffic to the left of the high traffic road to enter the roundabout. This intersection on the other side of town used to have a roundabout but got changed to lights a few years back.
Typically, NZ streets do not have 4 way Stop signs, and have considerably fewer Stop signs in general, tending more to Give Way signs on one pair of a 4 way intersection, or an uncontrolled intersection.
I remember the blinking yellow, blinking red late at night routine, when I was growing up, here in Hamilton.
It’s been years and years since I saw it anywhere. I wonder if somebody decided that people don’t remember what to do with them when they’re tired or something like that.
How do I know if there are signs at the intersection? Usually I look: if there are no signs, then there are no signs. But if there is a sign, then there’s a sign.
(Is this some sort of zen koan?)
I don’t have time to read all the replies to see if this has been mentioned, but I see a potential problem with having so many yield signs. When two cars come to a yield sign, the car in back may be looking at oncoming traffic and think it looks clear enough to keep rolling while the car in front may be doing something else, even slamming on his brakes and stopping altogether. When there’s a line of cars, people have to pay attention to two directions. Attention has to be split more than at a stop sign.
While that isn’t really a danger and probably doesn’t account for a lot of accidents now, I bet it would make accident rates go up if you replaced 95% of stops with yields.
As you do here. At least in Illinois. Google “uncontrolled intersection” and the name of your state to see if the law applies in your state, too.
I’ve had 6 accidents in my driving career, all minor, but all caused by that situation. Lots of give way signs in Australia, few stop signs. Stop signs are placed where visibility isn’t ideal.
Driving speeds can be slowed right down to a crawl, if desired, by design elements (for example, rougher paving textures–cobbles instead of asphalt). There are many such elements; the more are incorporated into a street design, the slower traffic will go.
In general, though, American traffic engineers see their job as providing “unimpeded flow,” which is to say moving cars through as efficiently as possible regardless of the consequences for the streetscape and people not in cars. What safety standards are commonly obeyed have to do with the safety of cars and drivers more so than bicyclists or pedestrians. An intersection near my mother’s house was recently converted from T to circle (with Yield signs), which removed some brief delays for drivers making left turns from two of the approaches–but it also destroyed a walking route through the intersection. With its flow unimpeded by any signed Stops, it is now totally unsafe for pedestrians to cross.
Meanwhile, I live in a rural area, with one very small town and a grand total of one traffic light in the entire county of ~380 square miles. A significant fraction of the county’s lesser roads are unpaved dirt tracks, and many of these don’t have two “lanes” of width–when cars approach from opposite directions, somebody has to run off the road a little. Until a few years back, there was actually a public road that ran in a stream bed for part of its course. And yet, for all that, there are Stop signs all over the place.
(Bolding mine.)
http://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.61.190
In Washington State you are required by law to slow down before approaching a yield sign.
Interesting. Of course that’s Washington state, which is already looking strange in this context. And what exactly does “reasonable for the existing conditions” mean? To me, if I can see that the other approaches are clear, it’s reasonable for me to burn through without ever touching the brake.
But under the Washington standard, if it were upheld in practice for the many intersections without such wide visibility, I suppose many Stop signs in my neck of the woods could be replaced by Yields. But since reasonable safe driving practice for these would in fact require a stop or near stop, why not just keep things clear and simple, and say Stop?
I would treat them like the onramps in the Twin Cities that had red/green lights on them. When the light turns green, you’re allowed to merge onto the highway, but you still have to yield to cars that are already there.
No. The question is “How do you know whether its an intersection where no sign means you have the right of way, or whether it’s one that means that you follow basic stop sign rules?”
It’s not like you usually can tell far enough ahead of time whether the other roads have signs–that’s why four way stops are always labeled.