Keene, NH has been replacing their stop-lighted intersections with roundabouts, resulting in big reductions in pollution, accidents & injuries, and costs. “Slowly moving is better than waiting at a light any day.”
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And there's another place I'll never go because of the sheer hassle of dealing with roundabouts.
Cryptic signage. High-speed oncoming traffic. All the "joys" of highway merging, minus the highway.
Who decided that replacing a simple binary choice ("Either I can go or I must stop") with a huge set of indecisions ("Which lane do I have to be in? Will that car slow down? Will the people behind me stop honking?" Etc., etc., etc., etc.) was a smart idea?
In case it isn't clear, I despise these things with a passion.
Despise them if you like—I'm genuinely not telling you what to think—but I'll take your annoyance in exchange for the significant reduction in crashes/injuries and improvement in traffic flow that roundabouts consistently provide.
Roundabouts are ubiquitous here in the UK. We have big ones at major road junctions, medium sized ones, weird shaped ones, signalised ones, small ones, mini ones (just some paint on the road) and even magic ones.
When you learn to drive with them, they are just second nature.
You give way to traffic already on the roundabout, join, drive around until you reach your exit and leave. Multi lane roundabouts require a bit more nuance, but you get used to it.
And they have the same binary choices as a junction. You give way to traffic approaching or you proceed.
I was going to comment that they're called rotaries in most of New England, and then I read the article which says, "These circular intersections are easily confused with rotaries or traffic circles, but are distinctly free of traffic lights." And now I'm confused because rotaries don't have traffic lights. They're just like what's shown here. Roundabout sounds too Anglophile to me.
Roundabouts are great for cars, terrible for pedestrians and urbanism. Cars don’t stop, and street corners are eroded in wide sweeping arcs. Free flowing traffic is not the sign of a healthy city.
They replaced a major intersection in Austin with a roundabout a few years back and *permanently* fixed the traffic there—a five-minute wait at rush hour is now a 30-second navigation, even after a decade of population growth. Now, of course, the Austin subreddit has collective amnesia and LOVES to complain about the roundabout.
The big thing to understand about roundabouts is that the bug is actually a feature—the fact that you have to slow down, make eye contact, and navigate carefully is the exact reason they're so effective and safe compared to traffic lights.
That would be great if people actually slowed down in these awful things. They don't.
If you don’t like roundabouts: in my village we have two mini roundabouts next to each other from which they removed the roundabouts in the middle. So you have to imagine the roundabouts are there, and act accordingly. Still works fine. No accidents yet.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/controversial-california-crossroads-junction-nominated-084409498.html
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