Roundabouts
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I've been in the Arc de Triomphe roundabout a few times. It's a little frightening if you are not used to it, but it works amazingly well (famously every few weeks a car runs out of fuel driving for hours on the innermost ring). No way in hell would the traffic flow nearly as well with an intersection.
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The best thing about roundabouts is you can avoid going to unpleasant places.
The M25 in SE England is the best example of this.
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None in our town, but in the adjacent suburb there's one in the center of town. Each of the streets leading to it has a stop sign.
I may have posted this in the past:
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None in our town, but in the adjacent suburb there's one in the center of town. Each of the streets leading to it has a stop sign.
I may have posted this in the past:
@george-k said in Roundabouts:
Each of the streets leading to it has a stop sign.
Yeah, they did that on ours, too, even before the current debacle. It rather defeats the object.
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None of our roundabouts have stop signs, they have yield signs.
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@jolly said in Roundabouts:
None of our roundabouts have stop signs, they have yield signs.
Yes, that's what they're supposed to do.
Having said that, back where I used to live in the UK, the roundabouts got so ridiculously busy that they ended up putting in traffic lights as well.
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I have driven extensively in Carmel and their roundabouts are great. Except that they are at every freaking intersection in some areas. It gets tiresome.
That said, we are getting a lot more around me and they work pretty well. Where you get problems is the one laners where visibility is not as good coming up to it.
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@doctor-phibes said in Roundabouts:
gives priority to cars coming onto the rotary LIKE THE FUCKING FRENCH DO
Hu? That's not how French roundabouts work, I think. The whole point of the roundabout is that those on the rotary have priority.
@klaus said in Roundabouts:
The whole point of the roundabout is that those on the rotary have priority.
Yes, of course
I used to go through 4 rotaries on the way to school when I was in college in Boston. That route would have been unusable without them.
They could solve a lot of problems in Northern Virginia.
Where was I where they had rotaries but then the idiots had traffic lights in each of them? That destroyed the whole thing. Detroit maybe.
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The US driver hadn't even figured out the zipper method of merging and now you expect them to understand a roundabout?
@kincaid said in Roundabouts:
The US driver hadn't even figured out the zipper method of merging...
Another thing that frequently sends me into apoplexy.
I probably need to calm TF down.
Having said that, I was once stuck in a traffic jam in the UK near my parents house, and cars were actually blocking emergency service vehicles from getting through by using lanes they weren't supposed to. In the end a couple of large trucks took action to essentially run these drivers off the road in order to let the ambulance through. It was genuinely sickening to watch. I think on the whole US drivers are a lot better behaved when they hear an ambulance or fire engine.
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While in the rotary, never make eye contact
Never
It is an admission that you see them.
A Bostonian will take advantage of that every time.
@copper said in Roundabouts:
While in the rotary, never make eye contact
Never
It is an admission that you see them.
A Bostonian will take advantage of that every time.
There's a legendary clip of a German TV journalist crossing the roundabout at Place de la Concorde in France live on TV, suggesting that the trick to crossing as a pedestrian is to avoid eye contact at all cost.
