The Pros & Cons of Traffic Circles (1 Viewer)

[Grant B]

AAAAHHHHHH! THE NIGHTMARE HAS RETURNED!!
Damn sadistic traffic planner!

 

[Ted Lee]

they kinda confused me the first time i saw one. :b

but i do like em. they just flow so much better.

heck, we even have them here at work for our primary gates.

 

[david stark]

from memory of my last visit to that super roundabout in swindon you could tell all the locals since they just drove throught the middle of the thing while all the outsiders would carefully go round all the roundabouts. It has been ages since I've been there, but I don't remember that central lamp post.

 

[Malcolm R]

Damn, BrianB. That thing's just evil looking.

I wouldn't have the first idea how to navigate that thing.

 

[Michael Pineo]

Holy crap!

That makes the rotaries here look simple by comparison. Are you actually supposed to stop at all of those lines in the road? Here, once you are on the rotary, you don't have to stop again. You have the right of way and just select the exit you need. I wouldn't know what to do on that thing!

Speaking of the Sagamore rotary, aren't there plans to get rid of it?

MikeP

 

[Jay H]

Imagine being in Paris and trying to get to the L'Arch de Triumphe without realizing there is a tunnel on one of the sidewalks? Mario Bartel and I did the exact thing when at the TdF last year. Fortunately, logic said to us there's got to be another way to get to the center, I don't see any dead tourists bleeding away in the road because crossing that roundabout would be tantamount to suicide!

We used to have a bunch of these circles (as they're called in Jersey) but most of them have gone away due to too much traffic. There are still some circles in NJ but not as much as before.

Jay

 

[PhillJones]

The one in Swindon is affectionately known as 'the magic roundabout' after the 70s childrens show.

The bad thing about the Arc de Ttriomphe is, or at least it was last time I was there, that they still have right of way for traffic comming onto the roundabout. All roundabouts in France used to be like that. I remembe finding it very funny to stnad on top of the Arc and look down on the chaos below.

 

[Jason L.]

Here in Kuwait they are all over the place.

The good part about them is that it is almost impossible to have a fatality in a circle, and that they work great when traffic is medium to low.

However, once it gets packed it becomes a nightmare. Traffic inches along while people on the inside try and get to the outside, and people on the outside try and get to the inside. It is a slow motion game of "chicken" as everyone tries to cut each other off. Pure chaos.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Another Mass resident here. I've found the worst thing about rotaries is that although you have the few people that try to crash through, even worse is the people that have never seen one freeze at the entrance and do not know how to merge into it. The Sagamore rotary is the worst (it is at the busiest bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, the gateway to the Cape for those unfamiliar). It gets so bad in the summer that you have to get in the side lanes and drive around cars with out of state plates because they are frozen like a deer in headlights by the least bit of traffic on the rotary. Also, like JasonL said, they do not realize that you take the outside of the rotary if you are going to exit early and the inside if you are exiting late or going all the way around. They all think they have to merge with the cluster of traffic closest to the inside and then they try to swerve back out for their exit. Enough to make a seasoned Mass driver nuts!

And yes, they are called "rotaries" in the states. "Traffic Circles" - pheh!

 

[Mike Lenthol]

At least it's inching along. There's nothing worse than waiting in traffic and seeing the traffic light cycle red to green 3 times and you don't move even half an inch

BTW, 'traffic circle' and 'roundabouts/rotaries' serve completely different purposes.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Mike, I did not know that. Being from Mass, we have rotaries, never heard of a traffic circle and it sounded like they were the same thing. What exactly is the difference?

P.S. I was just expressing the tongue-in-cheek "MassHole" driver attitude that since we have the most, we get to name them mentality. Just busting on myself .

 

[Mike Lenthol]

I think rotaries are used for traffic control(i.e. 2+ lanes each way intersection), and traffic circles are for slowing people down(i.e. 1 way local roads).

Too bad they didn't give us that option here, and we now have a stop sign every 300 feet on residential roads. Those who complained about speeders got more noise from the signs.

 

[Zen Butler]

Agreed,

When giving directions to outsiders though, I have to give them avoiding the circle. People lose their minds if they've never been in one.

 

[Mark_vdH]

In Holland, where we have many rotaries by the way, so called "zebra paths" (striped paths giving pedestrians the right to cross the street) are on each road leading to a rotarie.

Pic taken from the inside of a rotary:

 

[Jay H]

Watching cycling races in Europe, I get to see alot of rotaries, roundabouts, traffic circles, etc. A lot of them with road furniture with the police above them waving a flag so nobody runs into them. Never fails that one unlucky schmoe goes on one side of the roundabout while the rest of the peloton goes on the other. I remember watching the commentary on the Tour de France when Bob Roll admitted to being that lone rider when he used to ride professionally as a domestique for 7-eleven, Motorola, and the team Z.

Jay