The think I don’t like about not being able to “speed” at 50kph(!) through a city is that, at least in Australia with it’s excessive compliment of bureaucratic Karens, is the 30 > 50 > 70 > 60 > 40 > 30 > SCHOOL ZONE > 80 > 40 > 50 > 30 nightmare.

Which does two things, raises state revenue and causes drivers to spend way to much time concentrating on how fast they are going rather than driving to suit the conditions and paying focusing to what’s going on in front of them.

And don’t get me started on the pot holes.

You only need one roundabout to be able to drive for hours without seeing a traffic light. It’s one of the main features of loops.

Guess what works better and barely has any traffic issues at all.

The one that where mass transit works better.

But yeah, a city still needs cars, and roundabouts are still unbeatable in low-traffic crossings. But they are not the most impacting change a city can make.

I know of a couple in NSW: one in Albion Park, and another in Bomaderry.

They work well when the peak-hour traffic tends to block some of the entrances. You can use the lights to allow the blocked entrances to flow, then turn the lights off out of peak-hour.

In England we even have roundabouts of roundabouts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)

The footprint is a cost problem once.

Land can approximately be converted to a recurring cost via rents.

A roundabout can be as simple as a circle painted in the middle of an intersection, plus a bit of signage. It doesn’t have to be a big thing.

Agreed, it can be really hard to get around a roundabout as a pedestrian if it's not designed for it, and then they make it so both you and people entering don't know each other are there until you're about to get hit.

They replaced a intersection near me that would get backed up very badly during rush hour with a roundabout that has a much higher capacity and never seems to get backed up.

Yeah, I know what you mean by abusing 4 way stops being abused. Thankfully I moved from there a long time ago.

Also where I moved from recently, they changed a roundabout intersection into a traffic lights intersection. And the traffic used to flow. Now it’s a stand still.

There’s always so many little insights when you use the road daily that a planner will never have unless they do the same.

Melbourne where I am kind of close to now, has an absolute clusterf*ck of overpasses, underpasses, toll ways, free ways, tunnels all coming & going out of a neatly planned grid. They probably think it’s planning perfection while driving it as a non-resident is an absolute nightmare. Sydney which is famously poo poo’d for not being planned in Australia is 10x more straight forward to drive.

They’re being used often in new construction areas. It’s just not likely that they’ll be retrofitted to existing areas due to needing more space than regular intersections.

They are everywhere in the areas around me now. I had a similar sentiment at one time and now they seem pretty common.

I think roundabouts work fantastically well in some places but in others they are unnecessary and in others don't work as well as alternatives. Maybe that's obvious but every so often I feel like they are overapplied — probably because of what you're mentioning, along with the fact they were underapplied in other areas in the past. I've come to like them usually but sometimes it feels like the civil engineers were having too much fun at the cost of practicality.

Roundabouts are much more common in the US than they were 10 years ago.

You almost missed it!

This is completely wrong. Well designed roundabouts work very well.

The big difference is that when you have a collision at a 4-way or 2-way stop, it is almost always a "T-Bone" collision, where all the energy hits at a right angle. These collisions kill, especially at speed.

A similar collision on a roundabout is almost always a "glancing" blow, at an angle, and rarely causes injury or death.

Roundabouts force you to slow down when approaching. Stop signs can be ignored. Roundabouts can't.

I was in Aruba recently, and I discovered that they had entirely replaced their traffic lights with roundabouts. Easier to maintain and more efficient in the island's low-traffic regime.

Two lane roundabouts are fantastic if you’re familiar with the intersection. If you’re not it’s too easy to get shunted out of the roundabout early

I was hoping that it was "404 not found"

It would be interesting to know your (friend's) country of origin.

Not much of America's traffic infrastructure works well. Every month, combined with poorly trained motorists, it contributes to another 9/11's worth of fatalities. The infrastructure you think works, kills enough people for a thirteenth month at the end of every year.

They have their downsides, but "It doesn't work in America" is more informative of American motorists than roundabouts

Thank you so much for putting into words what I have feeling but struggling to verbalize. (Boston area, drive for work.)

There is one more downside, they are easy to get lost in, especially in an unfamiliar area. Apple Maps does an OK job guiding me most of the time, but just yesterday I spent an extra 25 minutes going through the same roundabout 3 times before I went the right direction, and each time I had to drive the wrong way, turn around, and then negotiate the same roundabout again.

The key disadvantage of a roundabout is that it takes up more space and is harder to setup than plopping down a couple of stop signs.

They are awesome otherwise, I do like them better for low traffic intersections though because I don't have to stop and think about if the next car is going to yield or not.

I think here in China we are not super fan of roundabouts. But we got a 4-lane roundabout with traffic lights [1] and a roundabout on elevated roads with traffic lights. [2]

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/rY6AH8nUEKvRuk1LA

[2] https://maps.app.goo.gl/Wea6Wt5FwHgKmG4C9

Reminder that technically a 4-way stop is the smallest possible roundabout.

Roundabouts are the Segway of civil engineering. In theory, a game changing transport innovation. In practice, just a little too mismatched with everyday aesthetics to properly fit in. Dorky and annoying for pedestrians too!

Good old traffic lights have a much better feature of being able to control traffic to allow for pedestrians, give cyclists a head start, give smaller side roads a look in at busy junctions, and giving a platform for traffic monitoring.

I feel like the author would appreciate Milton Keynes, which is an entire city of 180 roundabouts on a grid system:

https://lostcolonials.wordpress.com/2015/09/20/milton-keynes...

Fun for drifting late at night. Like a chav version of tōge from Initial D.

It's so funny seeing most of the comments, plus the original article, implying that roundabouts are always better or always worse than traffic signals. As someone who used to be a Transportation Engineering professor, they have a time and place where they outperform traffic signals but it's definitely not everywhere. It is known and there are many traffic simulation software tools that will give you a pretty good indication of what will happen if you put a roundabout here or a traffic signal there.

This thread reminds me of when my libertarian friend was explaining to me how traffic shows how everything can work well when everyone acts in their own self interest. Well, sure, except for all the traffic laws, the difference between User and System Optimal that traffic engineers spend much of their lives trying to bridge, and, you know, the fact that it took an enormous effort by government to build smooth roads and put up signs everywhere. Sigh. I'm not saying Transportation Engineering is the most important, innovative field, but funny things happen when not transportation engineers talk about transportation systems.