Imagine you live in England

That 2nd pic looks like a SCCA event.

I think I would just drive straight across to the other side.

Never seen one of those bizarrovision contraptions. I mean, there's a pretty crazy taffic system in some places in Croydon, but nothing like that. The cars look pretty ancient, too, so I doubt that they even exist any more. Anyway, it looks like it's in Swindon, and nobody in their right mind would ever go there

The irony is that the comma misuse makes the person who wrote that page look like the idiot

They are actually really easy to navigate.

If you're going left all you're doing is stay on the left lane and that'll take you all around the roundabout to your chosen exit. If you're going right you've been kept away from the other traffic until you've reached your exit. As you've got right of way in a roundabout you can then exit without trouble.

Sheesh. Just because the Fins can't drive

Angus_D - I do not entirely agree with her sentiments but
she is from Finland - not her native language etc...

The cars don't look that ancient to me. late 1980s, early 1990s maybe. That is quite a roundabout. It beats the notorious double mini roundabout on Norwich Road in Ipswich, which most people just drive directly over (and/or into each other).

Having just got back from a trip to the UK to see family after several years, I have to say you guys have screwed things up by adding traffic lights to so many roundabouts. The whole point of a roundabout is not having lights. You have turned roundabouts into the confusing things we have here in Washington, DC!

Mastrap: what you have described is exactly how you would get around any roundabout. What extra work are all the mini roundabouts accomplishing?

I can't believe we're having this conversation

They stop the whole big roundabout from getting clogged up with traffic. At least that is the theory. See the multiple lanes? One of them should always be free to get you to your exit without you having to wait for everybody else to get off. Its a filtering system.

And yes, traffic lights on roundabouts is a nuts idea.

Wasn't that on NL: European Vacation?

Are we sure that isn't a case of PhotoShop?

� I've never seen anything like it and I've been here for a while.

� No council has that much of a sense of humour to put "The Magic Roundabout" at the top of a sign for said weird roundabout.

Agree about the traffic lights thing. But they solve a problem introduced when they started making roundabouts faster - I can name at least three roundabouts which are literally 30 minutes wait to get on them during rush hour.

As a point of information, England is not an island. Sorry to be pedantic, it's just a kneejerk reaction I always feel when our roundabouts get criticised.

This is NOT a Photoshop nor is it old it's commonly known as a 'Magic Roundabout' and it's in Swindon (but there are others). It may look mental but it allows you to take 'short cuts' So you are on the junction for less time.
Example looking at the sign linked above: If you wanted to go down the road over on the far right (with the little blue sign on). On a regular Island you would have to go all the way round (clockwise), but this way you can take a right, and be on the junction for less time. Link to a Swindon website about said roundabout.
Traffic Lights have been installed on Islands where Traffic volumes have increased beyond the design capability of the island, without the lights on many of these islands they would be blocked solid. The best thing would be to do away with the roundabout completely at these junctions, and replace them with regular light controlled junctions IMHO. But sticking on a load of lights is easier.

hAHAhaah!

"Look kids, Big Ben! There's Parlaiment.

Big Ben, Parlaiment...Big Ben.."

OK, I forst saw the pictures, I thought 'what the...?' but, after looking at them a little more, i've decided we need more of these things.

oh, the cars, I see a previous model transit and some of the last model escorts. I'm betting mid-late 90's for the pic, that's only if the cars are brand new, it could have been taken last week for all i know. Not that it matters any.


You know, you can only go around a roundabout three times without exiting it? huh? huh? didya? didya? not that it matters.

So, yer god fella there, he's like putting the english on an island cos they're stupid or something, right?

Kinda like, ha ha, living on an island, that's where stupid people should live?

Like, those stupid englishmen, and scotsmen, and welshmen, and irish, and sicilians, and kiwis, and mauritians! Imagine being so stupid they got plonked on an island!



It's funny how yer person who made this site seems to have adopted the language of the idiots so poorly. (Hey I'm not saying I'm great, but I am an idiot after all)

That said, having moved to england not so long ago, I have noticed that the council guys south of the border have a strange predeliction with roundabouts, and "traffic calming" measures, and "escape lanes" (whatever the hell they are!), though silly council road features hardly requires that kind of hateful talk.

No-one PUT the english on an island, they bred here from Celtics, Picts, Germanics, Galls, Vikings, Romans and the likes over several thousand years (read Welsh/Irish, Scots, Germans, French, Scandinavians, Italians) to do all the silly work that no-one else wants to do, like experiment with monarchies, invent tennis, drink bitter and eat jellied eels - and that's why they're so dumb! I mean, these guys were picking up bits of mud for the Celts houses for thousands of years until the Romans came along and told them to build lots of very straight roads (The Romans had bigger whips than the Celts).

That last bit was a joke BTW, with a slight basis in truth, but we're not gonna go into the entire history of the British Isles at this moment are we?

Quite right too. England is no more an island than France. Or the USA come to that.

Sure it looks chaotic, but it is perfectly logical, and I don't see the problem with it...

I think it's the driving on the left that threw you off (which is, of course, the only way to go... )

Escape Lanes are part of roads that are on a very steep gradient - they're for Lorries / other heavy vehicles whose brakes have failed - they can aim for the escape lane (off the side) and the sandd slows then down (apparently)

I've driven around that roundabout many times and it works just fine. There is another similar one near in Colchester where I went to Uni... they look crazy but they are actually easy to navigate

I think that actually looks pretty cool, but must be heck with mirrors.

Then again for me the hardest part of driving SO FAR is trying to guess WTF is coming when you're at an intersection.

Every time my driving instructor would finally loose his patience and yell at me to "floor it"...

Single country on a medium to large land mass surrounded
by water and god fearing - Is what she means by "No wonder,
God put these idiots on an island"

England is not a single country on an island - Ireland ( counting the north )
and Australia are -Their God is definitely responsible for putting those idiots there.

Yeah, I've been round that a few times. First time I saw it I parked my bike up at the side of the road and watched for a few minutes.

It works really well, particularly in rush hours, and I spent a merry half hour experimenting with all the various ways you could traverse it.

It's a shame we don't have more traffic islands over here in the states, instead of the stupidly pointless 4 way stop signs and all the traffic lights. But then, from the reactions here it would lead to mass panic as the standard american driver, who doesn't look where they're going because they're too busy drinking a latte and chatting on the cell phone, would be forced to actually think about what to do. This obviously isn't going to happen because they're incapable of intelligent thought once they get into they're car, but fine as long as there's a traffic light to tell them what to do (most of the time anyway)

At least that's what the drivers here in Houston are like.

J.

It's funny, a friend introduced me to the concept of the magic roundabout just a week ago!

It took me a second to figure it out, but it does make sense.

As it is, traffic circles can handle much higher loads of traffic than a regular lit intersection before becoming gridlocked... it's a shame they're not used more often in the U.S. (Look at France, where they have them [presumably as traffic-calming devices, as we also have here in Maryland] even on little country roads.

tooki

I am waiting for the chance to marry a hot english lady and moving to York

We have meter lights.

What's one of them?

But it is on an island.

And the magic roundabout is real and useful.

And it is called the magic roundabout, and shown as such on maps.

We English like to think of it as a continent.

Albeit a very, very small one.

Your mean "the" hot English lady

The link doesn't work for me anymore... So I can't see what the picture looks like.

Ming