Comment by maest
1 day ago
I'm all for hating bad infrastructure, but this roundabout seems pretty straightforward? Maybe it's different when you're actually driving on it, but from a topdown view it's clear it's a central roundabout with some extra sidelanes to avoid the roundabout if you're immediately turning right.
I’m typing this just down the road from this Kirkland roundabout. It is fine. I’m used to roundabouts from my old country tho. I do fear someone else will just hit me down there cause I don’t trust people around here on roundabouts.
A breath of fresh air is how much faster getting off I-405 is now. I used to wait a lot on the traffic lights that were there before, and now it is like a mini slow rollercoaster.
Talking to my American colleagues, they're often perplexed by roundabouts and don't really understand how they fundamentally work. They're also incredibly stubborn when it comes to convincing them that it helps with traffic flow immensely versus a 4 way stop sign.
When you’re walking the stop sign stops traffic for you so it’s a lot nicer. I’ve found that even with a marked crosswalk people ignore you if they’re not forced to stop.
And as a pedestrian, drivers going around a circle aren't necessarily going to see you until they're already exiting, even if the city didn't put something large in the center that entirely blocks their vision. Plus, you lose the ability to know which way a car is likely to go until it's already too late.
When I lived in Nashville, I spent a lot of time near a roundabout, and even after they redid it to be a bit better I still had to avoid it for my own safety. The light-controlled intersection next to it was much less of a problem.
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I guess jaywalking stuff makes this harder? Because in the UK for example, roundabouts will often be surrounded by marked areas for pedestrians to cross, but they are not proper crossings. You don't have to wait or expect traffic to stop for you, you just walk across when it's clear.
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I almost like them, but my commute long ago involved one that revealed a frustrating pathological case. Constant traffic flow in one direction can make an entrance entirely unusable. It makes the average trip more efficient, but the worst case becomes dramatically worse.
>Constant traffic flow in one direction can make an entrance entirely unusable.
Seems like a poorly designed roundabout then. You should just pull into the roundabout, right after the car already in the roundabout passes by. Something is wrong if one direction of traffic can block the flow from other directions.
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