Roundabouts Are Safer. So Why Does The U.S. Have So Few Of Them?

Civil engineers saying "I don't know why we do things that way, that's just the way we were taught" is like 90% what's wrong with the American transportation system, as Strong Towns often points out.

I worked for a UK company that had a large office in Texas. When the office was refurbed they decided to add a low speed 20mph roundabout that all vehicles would have to negotiate as they entered the site to filter vehicles to either the visitor car park, visitor drop off/reception, staff parking or goods inwards. To say there was an uproar from local staff would be an understatement. However, management stuck to their guns and it was duly installed for when the office reopened, and within a week not a single complaint was heard again apart from visiting delivery drivers who were using it for the first time. 😉 A year later a request for a roundabout to be added to the other office in Chicago came from the staff representative committee as they had heard how good it was !

I often see comments from truck drivers criticizing roundabouts - I'm a truck driver in the UK and they're great for us. Every trucker knows how much of a pain stopping and starting is, particularly at night when there's no other traffic. Also, they make every turn a wide swing, you don't have to jacknife the trailer on a tight crossroads - and they give you the chance to turn around rather than doing a series of turns around the block. They only become an issue when the town puts a load of trees in the centre, so you can't easily see if something is approaching from the other side, trucks take off very slowly, so often you can be 6 feet into a roundabout and a car comes along, especially if they're driving quickly.

I used to be anti-roundabout, but over time more of them have popped up where I live. Once you get used to driving through them and learn the rules of the road, they are actually quite good, as traffic isn't hindered by waiting at long traffic lights.

One of the best features of roundabouts is that when there's little traffic, nobody has to stop, unlike a four-way stop or a junction with lights (unless the lights are responsive to traffic).

I live in Idaho and the city I'm in started to build roundabouts back in 2018 and people were angry the city was doing away with 4 way stops. The last 4 miles of my commute from work to home use to take about 30-40 minutes depending on the day of the week but has been reduced to about 6 minutes thanks to the roundabouts. I feel people resisted them because the weren't sure how to use them but now everyone praises them.

Can you imagine living in a time before stop signs were invented?! And then one day some guy was like "what if we stopped?" And then everyone was like "yeah, that's a great idea."

At Stanford University, we have an unmanned heavily used bike intersection, where students have to guess who can cross. Decades ago, someone (maybe graduate students doing research!) placed a temporary circle in the middle of the intersection. It worked.

I love that the mayor of Carmel, Indiana did his own thing based on his experience and research.

My city put in 3 roundabouts a few years back and people LOST. THEIR. MINDS. You'd think they were trying to switch to driving in the left lane with all the panic that ensued. Fast-forward to the present and people are used to it, and they definitely help with the flow of traffic. I even bike through them almost daily, though if traffic is a little worrisome I can always use the sidewalk.

4:00 Don't worry, there can still be collisions in roundabouts if the drivers don't follow the law about which lane to enter and exit from and don't position themselves properly.

Last year I vacationed in The UK and had a rental car. The roads were narrow, cramped, and not many multi lane roads. Driving through Salisbury, there was a lot of traffic, and I feared it would take forever. To my surprise, the traffic moved a constant 30 mph and flowed smoothly through the roundabouts. It took less time to get through a similar sized city than in the US, and the constant movement alleviated feelings of impatience. It was a completely different experience. That being said, the lack of available parking near destinations was much worse than in the US, and was annoying. The few traffic lights that existed were also different. In the US, the traffic turns from green to yellow to red. It also does that in the UK, but it also has a yellow phase between red and green, so you know when to anticipate a change. This resulted in much fewer red light runners, and it also made people take off on green in a much quicker and more orderly fashion. It was fascinating.

German towns also love putting roundabouts on the first intersection inside city limits on major roads. This forces drivers to slow down, and as such hugely reduces the amount of people barreling through a town at 50mph.

They've been showing up in Minnesota. They were certainly unexpected to me, as I wasn't familiar with them, but I am glad for them now. They absolutely are safer and allow for smoother traffic flow. Why wait for a light at an empty intersection when you can just proceed through a roundabout? Why get stuck waiting for cross traffic to clear before proceeding? Why have people take turns going through a busy four-way intersection one at a time and possibly get confused about who should go when? Roundabouts make infinitely more sense. Even if someone fails to yield the right of way, you're likely to see them and you're already going slow enough to avoid them.

Living in the UK you get pretty used to negotiating roundabouts of all shapes and sizes. The only time I every got a bit confused was when faced with the magic roundabout in Swindon. which is 6 roundabouts around a central roundabout. Scary stuff 😃

As an Australian living in the US, I have been wondering why no roundabouts? Roundabouts mean you don’t have to stop as much, traffic flows continuously.

Rethinking not just intersections but more of our infrastructure has really helped the Netherlands so much in terms of liveability over the last 5 decades. 'Not just bikes' has a ton of video's on that here on YT.

Having lived in most of the countries mentioned here (Spain, UK and the Netherlands) I have to say that the Netherlands has by far the best traffic solutions. France and Spain have arguably too many roundabouts and plonck them down everywhere whereas in the Netherlands, when creating new infrastructure, the situation is always carefully analyzed by the traffic planners to see what intersection solution is most suitable be it traffic lights (almost ALL Dutch traffic lights are "smart" and work with multiple sensors built into the roads which will detect traffic and decide based on that which lights turn green), single lane/double lane or turbo roundabouts. Turning the traditional US traffic light intersections into roundabouts will not always work because it's not planned ahead of time and therefore doesn't fully cooperate with the surrounding infrastructure. If you want to learn more about European (mainly Dutch) city planning I highly recommend the YouTube channel "not just bikes" which is ran by a Canadian bloke.

I live in Carmel. Its absolutely cool with the roundabouts. The traffic is pretty smooth. Very helpful to drive without stopping while going to work.

My small Colorado town has multiple roundabouts, and the only problem we have is that the population is rising and overloading the lanes - but even so, the wait during the heaviest traffic periods is far less than that when we had signals with far less traffic.