Comments by "Science in Engineering" (@matsv201) on "American Reacts to WHY the USA Hates Roundabouts" video.

  1. Being someone who live where there are to many roundabouts. They are not all good. There are drawbacks that they American Europhiles never talk about. Firstly, they really take a lot of space. Secondly they don´t work well where its very little traffic, there is just no point to them. Thirdly, they don´t work well where its very uneven load on the road from different direction. They work poorly on high speed roads as well. Worst is the totally pointless micro roundabouts. There seam to be a subset of people in the US that think roundabouts solve everything. They don´t. There was a phase in europe in the 90s where very town would build maximum amount of roundabouts, regardless if they made a point or not. Its not like there are not traffic-lights in Europe. Some of the more stupid roundabouts are being removed. Also worth saying that traffic-light in general work a bit different in Europe than in the US. They are usually deployed in high flow dense urban streets with relatively low speed. Where the 4 way high speed traffic-light simply don´t exist in Europe, and they also don´t have roundabouts. Typically they are solved with a underpass, a mid pass (where you can cross traffic, one way, then hold in a mid pass to enter traffic on the other side). or a loop around where you are forced to go in one direction to the next under pass and loop around. You never see traffic-light at 70km/h road or faster in Europe. If they do traffic-light temporary on a 70km/h road or faster, they put typically a 50km/h sign half a km down the road to calm down traffic
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