Comment by gs17
6 hours ago
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.
> You should just pull into the roundabout, right after the car already in the roundabout passes by.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: the issue is that there's another car right there, when traffic is heavy.
It's more a poor place for a roundabout. It was a very busy intersection in one direction, where the switch to roundabouts meant there was no longer a break in traffic. What it needed was a light with a sensor to let the very sporadic side traffic through (technically, a roundabout can have this, but the 3/4-way intersection that's always green except when someone needs it to not be is better), what we got was an endless stream of cars blocking the way for a lot of the day. If you pull in after the car already in the roundabout passes by, you get hit by the next one.
>If you pull in after the car already in the roundabout passes by, you get hit by the next one.
Yes, that seems like a roundabout design defect. Seems like the radius of the circle is too large, so cars aren't slowing down enough.
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