h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

To go back to the beginning - I heard an interview on the radio last week with the head of traffic police (or something like that) who has introduced 50 roundabouts onto the Florida roads - even the Land of the Free is no longer free of them!!!

I live in Cirencester and often find myself on the 'Magic Roundabout' in Swindon - its' great, when it's empty, you can tackle it any way you like (zig-zaggy) and when it is busy you can just enjoy the confusion. All visitors to the UK should go to Swindon ('the home of the mini roundabout') just to experience it and see how tragic we English really are.

In Gloucester a while ago they removed a medium sized roundabout and replaced it with traffic lights (52 sets in all). The traffic was instantly snarled-up. Then, a few weeks ago, the traffic lights broke completely and for a week they had to create a temporary roundabout with cones. While the temporary roundabout was in operation there were no jams whatsoever, however as soon as the traffice lights were operating again the jams instantly returned. Apparently, the Council were not prepared to comment on this revelation!!

Changing the subject very slightly, am I the only person to be sent insane by the sudden, mass invasion of "traffic calming" measures?
Namely, making a two-way road into a single lane road at specific points to make you either stop in the road or collide with the on-coming traffic. Also the enless selection of traffic humps (sleeping policemen) which makes all the traffic stop and start continuously and there are so many 'watch out ahead' bumpy lines on the road, you end up ignoring them completely. Has no-one thought about the massive waste of fuel caused by making all the traffic stop and start continuously just to slow down the "wicked" few who drive a little faster than they should?

And just before I left Swindon, the council decided that they would put traffic lights onto one of the main roundabouts. Chaos.

Reply to Freddie:

Back in the States roads intersect at right-angles. So, only two roads come together, intersecting either at a T-junction or a crossroad. Only traffic lights regulate busy junctions.

Reply to Slug:

I too find traffic-calming measures a real pain. But in inner-city areas where they've been introduced, accidents involving pedestrians, especially kids, have reduced considerably. Not only that, the injuries from these accidents are less serious. I guess we'll have to put up with it!

One of the problems with 'accidents', is that they aren't. Accident implies something unforeseen and unavoidable. Most of the times, when a car hits something, be it a pedestrian, cyclist, another car, stationary object, whatever, somebody was being careless. Snag is, it's not always the driver who's at fault, but it's usually the driver who gets the blame and has to carry the can. About 20 years ago, when I was living in Coventry, a couple of children were knocked down and killed. A local councillor publicly said that children often weren't as careful as they should be when playing near or crossing the road. She wasn't trying to say that these particular children weren't, she was just trying to defuse some of the anger against 'careless car drivers'. Needless to say, she was pilloried for stating her opinions.

Most cars are getting safer as far as protecting the occupants and other road users from 'accidents' is concerned. However, no more money is being spent on 'road-user awareness', so that 'accidents' happen less often. (According to the British Highway Code, 'road-users' covers pedestrians, drivers of all kinds, cyclists, motor-cyclists and people with animals.) Local authorities just install 'traffic calming measures' which, if road-users were more careful, wouldn't be needed.

OK, rant over, you can get back to the subject now!

Some mini-roundabouts are like traffic humps - and it's easier to go over them than around them.

One of the most effective 'traffic-calming' methods is the increasing use of double-parking in London. Navigating some streets is like a slalom!

Most mini roundabouts are designed like that so large vehicles (busses and trucks) can go over them to get round the corner.

In the London Docklands, near Canary Wharf, there's a big 'underground' roundabout. What's above it? Why, another roundabout, of course!

As an aside, both roundabouts lead to another roundabout, which has a wonderful traffic light 'instalment' at its centre. The artist has welded together dozens of working traffic lights to form a kind of tree (the posts are green), with the lights forever changing in seemingly random sequences.

And how many sad people have stopped at the roundabout, trying to work out if they're allowed to proceed?!

Just when it all makes sense,

A roundabout inFareham, Hamshire, a main junction of the A32, which has quite sensibly stood there for many a decade, now has pretty orange and yellow flowers growing all over it, and a few VERY LARGE SIGNS saying "THIS ROUNDABOUT IS SPONSERED BY ...", can't remember the company name, but HOW SILLY? Any other roundabouts got a sposor?

Yes, there are several in Lincoln - something to do with "Britain in Bloom", but the sponsors' signs are fairly small. Better than the litter-strewn weed patches that were there before, but I agree it's odd. Probably to keep a penny off the local taxes, but I've never seen it outside England.

There's one in Crawley, W. Sussex too. It's sponsored by Cheal's - a garden centre next to it, and they planted some box plants and clipped them so that they read 'CHEALS'. However, Cheal's has now been bought out by ome other comapny. The roundabout still says CHEALS, though.

Magic Roundabouts?????
If I ever saw a cue for starting a new thread, it could not be more blatant than that one!!!!!

Who else remembers Dougal, Zebedee, Dylan et.al??
(Clue - 1960s/70s BBC TV program)

There are two ways to deal with a mini roundabout. 1)Treat it as a normal junction. It helps if you knew what the priorities were when it *was* a normal junction. 2)Shut your eyes and just go for it. In my 13 years experience as a working driver in London, most people are *still* confused by mini roundabouts and have no idea how to behave at one - they sit at the give way line looking this way and that, not sure who they have to give way to. If you see the person to your right (the person to whom you should be giving way) hesitating in this manner, then you can feel pretty safe about flooring your accelerator with impunity and damn the torpedoes.

Hmmm, if these mini roundabouts are going to work at all, then 'give way to traffic approaching from the right' should be the norm.

Not "I got there first", the mantra of some moron I crossed yesterday - I believe the correct British English term for this person is 'git' - who forced me to do an emergency stop when he pulled out in front of me. He wound down his window and shouted 'this is a roundabout'. I felt compelled to explain to him in great detail just how stupid he was.

Road rage - I know it's bad, but talk about mitigating circumstances...

I am a careful driver, or a lucky one (you decide) and have never had an accident other than the usual "reversing into a bollard I didn't see" type thing you do when your learning. On the occasions I've come pretty close to an accident though, it's invariably been on a roundabout with traffic lights on it. I just don't get how they're designed to work. To mind mind roundabouts work well, but do so because they keep the traffic moving. I obey the rules of sticking to my lane through the roundabout until I reach the desired exit, but the minute I stop at a traffic light, all this traffic which isn't obeying the rules pulls in on my left and blocks me in. The lesson I learn is to break the rules myself on subsequent occasions. Also I've been on some roundabouts lately where the innermost lane suddenly disappears. The lanes are arranged like a spiral channelling traffic gradually outward. This is fine if all the traffic spirals out together, but more frequently I find I follow my lane but the guy to my left doesn't, and suddenly we're on a collision course. Sometimes I just want to turn round and do the roundabout again as I think "where did I go wrong?"

Oops. A few spelling mistakes in that. Sorry, I'm tired.

Then you get stupid drivers like me who miss the sign for their turn off and have to go round twice..

Traffic lights on roundabouts are (generally) one of the stupidest ideas in the history of motor transport. As has already been pointed out, the normal rules of using a roundabout break down completely if you hit a red whilst on the roundabout because of the drivers who go for whichever lane has the shortest queue of cars, regardless. When I got a Labour Party leaflet through my door proudly proclaiming that they were responsible for installing traffic lights on the Lea Bridge Roundabout in London, I vowed never to vote for them again, and I've kept that promise to this day. I can see the logic in the idea - wherever a smaller road meets a bigger and much faster road - especially a dual carriageway - at a roundabout (like some of those on the A1 for instance), the people on the smaller road often have to wait for ages, especially at busy times, because most drivers on the bigger road just have to get onto it as quick as they can, and if your vehicle is slow off the mark, like a bus, a van or a truck, you don't stand a chance against a constant flow of faster moving traffic. Why not take the roundabout out completely and build a regular lights-controlled junction? The only roundabout I know of where traffic lights and the aforementioned 'spiral lanes' actually works is the Hanger Lane Gyratory, and if I knew how to do it, I'd add a link to the Guide entry to it.

Thanks for that, goshoogoshoogosh, at least I know it's not just me! I was beginning to think I was a social misfit. I even brought the subject up once with an off-duty driving instructor (a friend of a friend). He went pale, glanced at his watch and mumbled something about being late for a lesson.

On my usual route home from work I negotiate twenty roundabouts and a series of about six "sleeping policemen". Total journey length: just over 19 miles.

At least, I *would* encounter the sleeping policemen, were it not easier to cut through a couple of narrow, one-way residential streets to avoid the humps altogether. A cunning plan by the authorities to encourage me to drive through more housing, with parked up cars on both sides to consider.

Another cunning plan by our local council, it seems, was the installation of a series of mini-chicanes along some of Bedford's roads. These involve the installation of a kind of small traffic island, set in about a foot from the kerb, and about maybe two foot wide. The idea is that cyclists can pass through the 1-foot gap between the island and the kerb, whereas other traffic has to swerve out into the middle of the road by three feet or so to avoid it. Due to the brilliant idea of marking these islands with a *black* bollard, quite invisible at night, one of them brought my father off his motorbike some weeks back. Road safety, eat your heart out.

The twenty roundabouts by the way are mostly in Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire, England). I've heard one of those throwaway truths somewhere that, due to the foundation of this city almost entirely on roundabouts, that this causes one of the country's highest rates of tyre wear. I can't say I'd be surprised.