Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "" video.

@C4Darkorbit Yes, the biggest issue that I've had with roundabouts comes from people driving too fast trying to beat traffic into the roundabout making it impossible for other users trying to enter the roundabout to judge whether or not it's safe to enter. That's how I almost got hit going through a roundabout that one time, the driver was nowhere near the roundabout and driving too fast and from the time that I started to enter the roundabout and when I was in, they'd closed the gap and didn't think they needed to yield. But, it would have been a much safer collision than what you'd get with a more standard intersection design.
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Same goes around here, they're being built in rural areas because there's the space and not enough traffic to make traffic signals worthwhile. That being said, they just started a project near me that's on the literal city limits, so it's probably just a matter of time before they start working their way into the city. The problem is that there aren't many busy intersections with the time to build a roundabout without tearing anything down.
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@johnPaul-qn3dg Not necessarily, we don't have the space for that, if they're filled with anything at all, it'll likely be plants of some sort. Most of the roundabouts we get are much smaller, so they're designed to allow larger trucks to just drive right over the top of them if need be.
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Yes, I personally think that as time goes by and drivers have more experience with them that the resistance will fade. The first experiences that I've had driving with actual roundabouts, as opposed to traffic circles, was in the suburbs where they were being used to reduce t-bone crashes from drivers not bothering to stop at uncontrolled intersections. But, you drive through a few of the one lane roundabouts and they really aren't that big of a deal.
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@88d4ce They've just recently started constructing a pair of those near me to help deal with traffic coming and going from the freeway. Previously you couldn't use the left lane going west because it was always clogged with the much too short left turn lane to get on the freeway. From what I understand, the pair of roundabouts shouldn't require knowing that ahead of time. You get in the left turn lane to eventually turn left or go straight. You get in the right lane to eventually turn right or go straight. Much less confusing than being hit with traffic in just one lane and have to worry about waiting it out or changing lanes to one that's going 40mph from a stop.
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@ChristiaanHW If folks are driving sanely, it's not that much of an issue. It's when you've got folks that are driving straight through without slowing down that you've got issues. Everybody entering a roundabout should be slowing down enough to figure out who is and isn't needing to yield and allow those that are entering a bit of time to start entering rather than trying to take advantage of being in the roundabout first to avoid slowing down.
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That's not surprising, there's really only 2 reasons why they aren't more common. One being space and the other being a lack of familiarity. Space is likely to always be an issue in cities that weren't designed for them. Familiarity though is less of an issue. As more are built, especially the one and two lane varieties, people get used to them relatively quickly.
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@milasudril Yes, and as they showed in Mythbusters, they can generate themselves. Which was funny because they were having issues with it even as they were trying to set up the conditions to create one. Roundabouts do help to smooth traffic out, but at a certain point, there's just too much traffic and a roundabout doesn't solve the problem when there's so much traffic that the roundabout is completely saturated.
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We're getting a pair of them near where I'm living. And all I can say is that it's about time. The left lane going west has been nearly unusable for years due to the traffic backing up to get onto the freeway, leaving the right lane being the only one that's functionally available for right turns and going straight. They just started construction on a pair of turbo roundabouts where either lane should be available for going straight and then either the left or right lane is also for turning in that direction. It should clean things up a lot, even if they wind up needing to add a signal to it during busier times of the day. There's a traffic light near me where you can have to wait 20 minutes for it to turn at some points in the evening because it just won't change unless there's a car coming from the opposite side or a pedestrian activates the signal.
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@rudib-5304 Presumably those are similar to the firestation signals here. They're basically blinking yellow unless activated. Around here, we just have the green phase in one direction pretty much perpetual during certain points of the day, which can be an issue if the sensor for the other direction isn't working properly.
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@Arltratlo In the US, nearly all roads in the country are some sort of highway. Keep in mind that the entire country of Germany is the same size as Montana. The US has a massive amount of space and in rural areas you do get highways crossing, although it's usually not that may lanes and there's generally either a traffic signal or a clover leaf or some other engineered interchange built to address it.
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@xFD2x Years ago I had the fortune to take with somebody working for the state DOT and he explained that the rural roundabouts were being put in for the simple reason that knuckleheads were assuming there would be no traffic coming, because there usually wasn't any traffic coming, and blowing through the intersection. The resulting t-bone collisions were killing enough people that the DOT started just putting in small roundabouts to put an end to it. But yes, the stop signs are cheaper and they should be sufficient, you're just neglecting the human element.
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@mmcbey1401 Not in this case. Unlike much of Europe the US was fortunate enough to avoid being blown all to smithereens during the world wars. The result is that we didn't get that opportunity to do a rethink on how our existing cities were laid out and we more or less explicitly designed the suburbs to be a traffic nightmare with few thoroughfares There's a highway not that far from me that's a traffic nightmare through much of the day because it's effectively the only option that doesn't involve driving on a maze of smaller and less direct streets through the area.
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@Bobrogers99 As previously stated, they have different rules. A roundabout generally is designed so that everybody can keep moving and that you yield to those already in. A traffic circle is essentially just a four way stop that permits a rolling stop rather than a full stop and mandates it by having a tree blocking you from just ignoring it. For residential streets they work quite well. But, they fail miserably when you've got larger streets with more lanes of traffic and higher speed limits. The main advantage of a traffic circle is that they can be installed pretty much anywhere, if you had a 4 or 5 way stop, you can usually install the traffic circle, the only real restriction is that they break badly with more than one lane of traffic being allowed through the intersection.
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@pdawg193 Yes, although getting trapped in them is a real thing that happens to people that haven't driven in them before. A one lane roundabout isn't so bad, but having one where there are different lanes going to different places can be tricky. My Grandfather got stuck in one driving in London. There were no survivors. /jk
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