I'm from Virginia and I drove through the Magic Roundabout three times last April (took a deliberate side trip into Swindon en route from Heathrow to Bristol just to see it). It worked quite well, but I think any attempt to use that elaborate a setup in the USA would result in disaster because people would not follow the rules on giving way.
Some of my friends to whom I've shown the pictures do think the sign looks like one of those amusement-park rides with the spinning teacups, though!
Holy roundabout, Batman!
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: Tuesday, 06. March 2007
Only in England, you might say - a roundabout appreciation society! For motorists who find simple traffic roundabouts confusing the Swindon "magic roundabout" in the U.K. looks like the ultimate nightmare -- the kind of driving challenge you might envision in your dreams -- if you took a hallucinogenic drug the night before your driving test.
Seen from the air, the roundabout is hard to figure out. It looks something like a cross between a maze and a driver training range. It's actually a large roundabout surrounded by 5 mini-roundabouts or, as some describe it, a multi-mini-roundabout.
'Swindonians' love the thing. It's almost a tourist attraction. It's reputed to have inspired the song " Roundabout" by local cult band XTC.
Roundabouts, or at least the modern successful versions of them, are largely a British contrivance originating around the mid-1950s. They had been around for a while before that, but the key to their modern success was the discovery that giving right-of-way to traffic already in the roundabout reduced congestion and increased efficiency.
Some love them and some hate them. Many users are under the mistaken impression that they hinder progress rather than help it. Nevertheless, they do work. At any rate they are now such a mundane part of motoring life that the Brits have taken to savoring them like a fine wine.
Architectural critic Joe Kerr devoted a Radio 4 program to them a few years back. Driving instructor Clive Greenaway founded the Roundabout Appreciation Society, and well-known photographer Andreas Zust devoted a collection to roundabouts.
There are even roundabout calendars. New Statesman writer Joe Moran describes the Milton Keynes version. Milton Keynes is a planned community in the heart of England. It's similar in many ways to the automobile-inspired suburbs of many U.S. cities. "Here drivers can lose all sense of direction," writes Moran. This is "a problem that Milton Keynes has tried to solve by naming its roundabouts and allowing companies to sponsor them."
"Lucky owners of the Milton Keynes 2004 calendar can see the results. Caught between sarcasm and affection, the caption writers invite us to chortle along at their painstaking efforts to identify the differences of a series of roundabouts which are, by implication, all the same: the Bottledump roundabout is "quite a cutie", the Denbigh Hall Drive one is a "cheeky little blighter" and the Two Sisters roundabout "breathtaking".
It almost makes you want to include Milton Keynes and Swindon in your tourist itinerary for Britain, along with Hadrian's Roman wall and Buckingham Palace!
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Rich,
Geimisson,
presciso do drive de som AC 97 placa mãe p4v800
Simon from SoCal,
The first modern roundabouts were in Summerlin, Las Vegas, NV, USA. New York might have had the first traffic circles, but definitely not the first modern roundabouts. Only modern roundabouts are springing up all over the place in America, not old ones. If you want to find old ones, go drive through New Jersey. In some instances, the old roundabouts or traffic circles are replaced with traffic lights but in hopefully more are replaced by modern roundabouts. Because modern roundabouts are obviously (backed with hard facts) better than traffic lights. It's getting to the point where most traffic engineers in the USA are at least admitting that roundabouts are useful in some applications, but not all of them admit that they're always good. I agrue that they're always good.
Rebekah,
i think round abouts are realy cool. they pretty much rock my world. i would be lost without them. i sometimes try to confuse people and give way to my left instead of my right. i learned my lesson when i had an accident.. oops... i wont do that again!
Tom in Chicagoland,
I think we have a couple of so-called roundabouts here. The one in Brookfield, ILL., known as 8 corners works pretty good in my opinion. Also there is one in the Northwest burbs that does not work so good, I have been there , but was suprised att.
Does it save fuel? In my opinion fuel consumption about the same.
Gary,
I believe the first roundabout was either in New York or Washington D.C.
