YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Some roundabouts here have bike pass troughs on the side (obviously only works if there is no turn to that side) for speedy drivers like you.

Other than that it's obviously by design. There is no reason to speed at constant 50kph in a city. Nether for a car, motorbike or e-bike.

> any speed I'm able to

Well, provided you can still stop in time should the lights begin to change.

Famous scene in Chevy Chase's European Vacation.

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)

My honest take roundabouts with traffic lights are just traffic lights with extra steps.

>The footprint is a cost problem once.

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

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.

According to Wikipedia, these shrubs are there for a reason. Denmark has found that blocking the line of sight significantly reduces the accident rate by forcing the drivers to slow down and consider only their immediate surroundings. Danish drivers hate them, anyway.

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.

National Roundabout Week should be two weeks separated by a week, so that if you missed the first week, you just wait another week and it comes around again.

There are quite a lot of videos of people ignoring roundabouts, and some of them even land on their wheels and keep going afterwards

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

Huh. You might want to look at how the residents of Carmel Indiana think about this.

https://www.carmel.in.gov/government/departments-services/en...

a city frequently ranked in the top 10 places in the US, also frequently ranked as one of the best cities in the US for cyclists.

Roundabouts are perfect when youre confused, just go around and read all the signs 3 times, then select the exit! :)

> but just yesterday I spent an extra 25 minutes going through the same roundabout 3 times

How big was this roundabout when it took 25 minutes doing 3 victory laps in a roundabout?

You might want to petition your local government to put the signs of the exits before the roundabout, together with exit signs inside of the roundabout, helps a lot to see what exit you should take.

Alternatively, try a different map viewer, both Google Maps and Waze handles roundabouts excellently with zero issues, Apple Maps might still be too new to be useful for daily use.

I think the main problem in England is that there is just too much traffic for too little road. I don't think there is a simple infrastructure solution to that problem.

For example I was going to point out that roundabout completely fail when one direction becomes nose to tail congested but when I thought about local examples, I'd rather take that over a set of traffic lights where it becomes near impossible to get out from one direction if the traffic keeps backing up onto the junction.

> Imagine if the US had roundabouts on the interstate and you're getting close.

What's the problem with a roundabout on the interstate? Obviously it'd have to be huge to account for the speed, so people don't need to change speed too much, but given the right size, it'd work wonderfully.

I agree with this, and I'll offer a rationale.

Because the US largely "grew up with cars", the economy was built around the expectation that folks can drive to work. The population density of the US reflects this, and mass transit just doesn't work in small/middle America. That means everyone needs to be able to drive. If you can't drive, you can't work. That isn't the case in the UK, and you'll notice a lot of these "driver beware" analysis is explained by the fact that driving in the UK is seen as a privilege whereas it is a right in the US. This sort of "mild chaos" is prohibitive for a lot of would-be UK drivers, and they just take the bus.

The UK has an over-reliance on roundabouts for junctions with motorways and large roads. They are also missing out on Turbo roundabouts, which are super cool and very common in the Netherlands.

>They work perfectly fine.

I don't want to celebrate UK roads too much. The majority of roundabout users in the UK are not indicating properly. Too many people are stopping at them when they have priority. Lanes are just a suggestion and using the correct lane is an invitation for someone to drive into the left of you.

In other areas: enough people don't know how to use a slip road that it becomes a problem to those who do. Likewise the flashing ambers of a pelican crossing. Lane discipline is much worse than on the continent, to the point you can see it creating traffic jams. Lots of people are driving big cars without the confidence needed to remain in their own lane.

There are millions of drivers who've never passed a theory test. We could do with more ruthlessness.

Try Spanish roundabouts. On the whole, poorly designed, implemented and regulated. On roundabouts with two or more lanes, laws favour those on the outside lane, so everyone takes the outside lane even if they are travelling 3/4 of the way round. As a result drivers who are in a position to take an exit, do not take that exit. In addition, indicators are not used by most drivers, or they simply leave their indicators on all the way round. In addition, it is not allowed to exit a roundabout from the inside lane even on to a two lane exit. In addition many roundabouts have three lanes to enter onto a two lane roundabout, or two into one, etc. No one knows the rules, or follows them, and no one seems to care, from the civil engineers right down to the end users. The only winners are repair shops.

In comparison, UK roundabouts are civilised examples of harmonious intellectual etiquette. Enjoy them.

[source] I learned to drive in Swindon, home of the Magic Roundabout.

A place where traffic slows down, without actually stopping, and becomes congested with no time/space gaps between vehicles, is worse for pedestrians.

Platoons of cars with space in between allow for pedestrians and vehicles to cross the road, downstream.

Nothing worse to have upstream of where you are trying to enter a road, or cross it, than a busy four way stop, with cars coming out of it at regular intervals, without sufficient time/space in between.

I think to an American, a roundabout is this thing that only works for cars and don't take pedestrians or bicyclists into account, with no paths or crosswalks or anything, so hence "Worse for pedestrians". I don't blame them, both roundabouts and care for pedestrians seems uncommon over there, so of course their experience will point towards roundabouts being worse overall.

(UK experience) If you're trying to cross the road leading onto one, it's much harder to tell if a vehicle is going to hit you at speed. I often observe people turning quickly, without indicating, and had I chosen to cross at that time, there would have been some kind of accident. Junctions tend to not have this problem since cars turning out of them are usually going much slower.

> - when there is too much traffic: if there is a constant stream of cars in the roundabout so you have to wait for a long time before being able to enter it, or force your way in (risking a fender bender), that's

I think it's fine with lots of traffic in a roundabout, but it has to be somewhat balanced.

For example, we have a roundabout that sits on a relatively popular road, with one exit/entry that leads to a bigger highway. During rush hour, there is heavy traffic, from from/to every one of the three points, so traffic naturally divides, as cars turn off.

However, when there is no rush hour, the highway exit/entry isn't used, so cars mostly just pass through the roundabout, and everything still works, as the two entries/exits are still balanced.

Issues would arise if it's only one entry/exit being used, as then it'd always block the two other entries from being used properly, but seems that never happens, so seems to me it's proper and works well, regardless of the traffic being heavy.

I don't understand the argument? Seems like you're saying that not having to handle a gear change makes roundabouts better, but that applies to both your manual technique and automatic, so I don't see how Europe would be different from NA?

Also, I'm not a particularly frequent/experienced driver but 4th gear at 30kmh on a roundabout doesn't seem very safe, it does not leave you much control to react to something unexpected (some car coming up that you didn't see, a car who changed their mind last minute about exiting, a car changing lane poorly...). Being able to decelerate or accelerate quickly is pretty important on a roundabout. Not such a big deal on a very big roundabout with excellent visibility where there's no-one, but that's pretty rare in europe at least.

Not a civil engineer but as far as I know, the space is part of the point. If you keep the roads straight but just draw a circle in the middle, you don't have a roundabout. It only works properly if the drivers have to curve in and out of it.

You could keep the same space I guess by pinching the roads tighter near the entries/exits but I don't think anyone is talking about that.

> You can draw a circle on the road and have “roundabout rules” without the need for any car to even turn their wheels.

If it's physically possible to "skip the roundabout", if it's just a drawing rather than hard barriers, people here (Spain) will just skip it straight up, unless there is a ton of traffic. I think lots of these driving rules and infrastructure has to take local culture into account, as it differs from "We follow laws like our collective lives depend on it" to "We see laws more like suggestions" depending on the country.

In Spain we have these two, sometimes right outside metropolitan areas, that see a lot of daily traffic, especially around rush hour. They're naturally balancers, if you plan them correctly, makes a ton of sense to default to roundabouts instead of stoplights.

Especially nice for us who plan our car trips based on when there will be the least public traffic out there, as roundabouts don't force you to stop when there is no traffic, and you can essentially keep the same speed with these large roundabouts.

>but for pedestrians roudabouts are way better than traffic lights.

This is ignorant texbook thinking.

As a pedestrian it's far easier to safely time a light, even one without a cross signal, than it is to cross through the un-broken streams of traffic that are entering/exiting a roundabout. You basically have to cross a ways back from the roundabout where the traffic is more like "just crossing a normal road". Which sucks if it's 4-lanes or really busy or fast or there's no sidewalk provision for that (like in the case of roundabouts at highway ramps) and is just a lot more walking to begin with.

For roundabouts that wouldn't be deserving of a light (i.e. the ones replacing 2/4way stops) it's a lateral move.

It's also only true when compared against a no-frills intersection. A two-lane roundabout has better overall throughput than a two-lane intersection with traffic lights. To increase throughput, they usually add turn lanes to avoid cars having to stop in the through lanes -- but the turn lanes require more road surface than the roundabout would have.