I’ve been a big fan of roundabouts for years. It’s utterly clear to me that as annoying as it can be to approach one when you’re behind someone who doesn’t know what to do, roundabouts are still much easier to negotiate than a normal four-way stop or light. It’s also clearly established that they are safer and that they move traffic through an intersection much more efficiently than do other forms of traffic management. And yet, on social media, every time roundabouts are mentioned, there will be a chorus of people complaining about how they hate them, they’re stupid, and so on. People do point out more and more frequently that this is simply and objectively false, but it still happens.
A very odd situation exists in the village of Hamburg, which we visit weekly for various reasons (a bakery we like, our favorite farmers market, and others). You see in the image above the Google Earth image of the village. The odd part is that the village has multiple roundabouts governing traffic on its eastern end, which makes that part of town a breeze to get through, and zero roundabouts on its western end, which makes that part of town kind of annoying to drive through. The western end is nothing but traffic lights, most of which are poorly sequenced and longer than they need to be; also, traffic is always heavy enough to make left turns very difficult, with the result that a single person turning left can really gum up the works. Every single week when we drive through Hamburg, I find myself thinking, “When the hell are they going to turn these lighted intersections into roundabouts?!”
I’ll close this with a tour of one roundabout that might test even my pro-roundabout convictions. Next time I’m moving through Swindon in the UK, I might well pay a cabbie to do it for me:
