Motorists still tend to blow through roundabouts at speed if they can't see anything coming. From personal experience you can easily navigate a roundabout at 35+ mph.

If a roundabout is small enough, you can't. I have seen many small roundabouts throughout Europe that you cannot navigate without swerving faster than 20-30 km/h (which is assumed safe speed for pedestrian).

https://goo.gl/maps/cmLVxuhViyF2

The space it requires is not much bigger than the traffic light. That town replaced many of its intersections with roundabouts even in central and older parts of the city.

(You might say they went a little overboard with it, looking at the southern limits near that hospital.)

Stop signs and some speed bumps would soon slow them.

The suggestion that anything important should be screaming and blinking (otherwise the poor driver couldn't have noticed) is patently ridiculous. There's quite a lot of other, less conspicuous things that a driver needs to be aware of (such as pedestrians or potholes).

[1] https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/intersection/other_topics/fhwasa...

Determining the best option for a given case is more an at than a matter of simple preferences.

I've also had the same problem turning onto a crossroad without coming to a complete stop at the stop sign first.

I believe the only real solution is driver training.

Obviously you want to having bicycles or pedestrians in your roundabout so adding a bike/pedestrian path next to the roads has to be part of the plan if you want to do it right.

I strongly prefer those setups because they are much more fuel efficient.

However, I don't think any of that would work in the UD because it would require real driving classes and tests. I had to drive around for close to 20 hours with a professional driving teacher on to of dozens of hours of theoretical classes. All that end in a 30min+ examination with a examiner in the back of the car putting me through as many challenging situations as possible.

In the western U.S. (and eastern suburbs) the 4-way stops are largely vestigial; I'd agree that most of them could go away without any loss of safety. Many of the newer neighborhoods are signed that way anyway, though - I just drove through one this morning with 2-way yields.

My driver's ed class was IIRC 36 hours of instruction and 12 hours in the car, with a professional driving teacher. It had an hour long examination putting me through as many challenging situations as possible at the end.

And on average a person needs 38 hours in the car with a professional teacher before they pass the exam, most people don't pass on the first try.

And don't get me started on driver ed in PA, USA: in my case, it consisted of a video, signing an drivers' permit application - and voila, go out there and drive (under supervision). I was shocked, shocked.

Try 50+ years. Driverless cars aren't happening anytime soon, and certainly not to a level where you literally don't need a licence to drive one.