Comment by MrSkelter
4 hours ago
Roundabouts do not need more space.
You can draw a circle on the road and have “roundabout rules” without the need for any car to even turn their wheels.
4 hours ago
Roundabouts do not need more space.
You can draw a circle on the road and have “roundabout rules” without the need for any car to even turn their wheels.
That approach fall down flat on nontrivial traffic amounts. Also it requires an actual hindrance in the middle to enforce compliance, and then bigger vehicles won't be able to turn left.
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.
The UK has mini roundabouts, which are just a painted white circle on the road: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Mini-rou...
Drivers treat them as a normal roundabout by giving way to traffic on the right.
I contest that drivers always treat it the same. They often go through the circle/cut th corner when there is low traffic, and I know at least one mini roundabout where traffic is way less frequent in one direction and the other direction is treated as the "main road" without slowing down.
I mostly like them though.
> 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.