“It has been dubbed Britain’s ‘most woke’ roundabout because drivers must give priority to pedestrians, then cyclists, and then other cars and lorries before continuing on themselves. Locals have pointed out the priority for cyclists and pedestrians is unnecessary as only cars and lorries regularly use the Boundary Way route.”
My issue with this roundabout is that it’s the worst of all worlds. It’s unusual, and complex for cars. Given how bad the average driver is, I wouldn’t want to be a cyclist or pedestrian dealing with this.
While it has its problems, Milton Keynes does non-car traffic quite well. It has “red ways” that cut under or over the main trunk roads. It’s possible to reach most of the city without having to cross a major road.
While retrofitting this is harder, surely they could come up with something better, for that sort of money.
Oh and as for the woke comments. I’ve found describing it/replacing it with empathy/empathetic works well. It seems to really annoy the gammon crowd, while turning those on the fence away from it, hard.
I might be daft, but how exactly is this complex? Or rather, how is more complex than any other situation where you have to give way? These kind of roundabouts is all you have over here. Never seemed difficult to grasp imho.
More than one “lane” you could turn into or out to. People are idiots, so you gotta remember how
hadbad things could get.I lived in a place with a basic circle put in to “smooth” traffic on a small-but-main avenue, and they had a town hall meeting, YouTube tutorial, and a hands-on workshop on how to navigate a regular circle. People still came to the thing, put a left signal on, and pulled straight into oncoming traffic because they wanted to go that way. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Ok ok, so you’re saying that basically any roundabout is too difficult. Then it’s a case of driver certification and not roundabouts. We really should stop seeing having a driver license as a right, rather than a privilege. Of course that will never happen.
The problem with not seeing driving as a right is without public transport you will alienate a huge portion of the most vulnerable people.
You need to solve other issues before you can start taking away licenses unfortunately
I rather have people be alienated then them crashing into other people. If not having a car is such a huge problem, drive better or move somewhere where you are not so reliant on a car.
There’s a town near me that put in a couple of roundabouts. There’s an old lady known to the entire area who will simply treat the roundabout like a standard 4 way stop that has a cone in the middle and just go whatever way she is going, so turn left to turn left, etc.
Maybe she should get a ticket
Any project involving the general public that requires an explanation is doomed from the outset. Explanations just don’t scale well.
Anyone who needs this roundabout explained probably shouldn’t be driving.
This looks like a perfectly ordinary round about to me, except for them driving on the left. It doesn’t have multiple car lanes.
The round abouts with multiple car lanes are indeed confusing to some people, and the ones I’ve seen all have the bicycle lanes offset to make crossings further from the center or dug out under the road.
Oh, not multiple car lanes, no. Just the pedestrian/bike throughway, I guarantee, will have a nonzero amount of drivers on it. Hence why I put lanes in quotes.
It’s the context switching. The cycle lane forms an effective roundabout around the roundabout. Drivers are keyed to looking for cars and cyclists on the road. The outer rim will push the cyclists out of their awareness. In effect, the bike will “appear” suddenly and at speed. Most drivers will still be fine, but a few will cause potential chaos.
Basically, it doesn’t follow the normal “flow” of most roundabouts. A few bad drivers will make everyone else’s life difficult.
And if that’s complicated you should not at all be allowed to have a drivers license.
Just copy Dutch roundabout design, they work great for both car drivers as well as other road users. Not complicated at all when copied properly.
We have plenty of variants of roundabouts here too. Many would work far better. They just seem to have combined 3 good elements in a way that they all disrupt each other in practice.
Cars need to watch for cyclists doing an unusual manoeuvre., as well as other cars reacting abruptly and unpredictability.
Cyclists can’t trust their right of way due to idiot drivers.
Pedestrians will get lost behind the clutter of the cycle path and are at risk of being run down.