Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 percent more air pollution

Re:Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 per... by kube-system on Saturday August 08, 2020 @01:57AM (#24089427)

I would be surprised if it did. The way a lot of our roads have been designed doesn’t really make yield signs an option. Only recently has the US begun to embrace roundabouts over the basic 90 degree intersection. Unfortunately, it’s hard to retrofit existing intersections because roundabouts take more space.

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Re:Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 per... by Sharlin on Saturday August 08, 2020 @08:46AM (#24091227)

Why aren’t yield signs an option? In Europe they’re ubiquitous, everywhere where a road or street lower in the road hierarchy crosses a higher-tier one. No roundabout needed. As far as I know they work just fine.

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Re:Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 per... by cameldrv on Saturday August 08, 2020 @03:53AM (#24089866)

As you say, roundabouts take up more space, and they are not nice for pedestrians. They're good for major interchanges if you don't want to build an underpass and there's lots of land. If land is cheap though, where are all the cars coming from?

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Re:Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 per... by anarticle on Saturday August 08, 2020 @09:13AM (#24091392)

In the 90s, many roundabouts were removed especially in the northeast. I don’t think this is true. In New Jersey alone I can remember seven or more very large roundabouts that were removed.

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Re:Drivers who keep their windows down are exposed to 80 per... by peatmoss on Saturday August 08, 2020 @10:28AM (#24091833)

Those that you’re thinking of were likely “rotaries” which have some major design, functional, and qualitative differences as compared to roundabouts. Size, travel speed, and enforeced entry angle are the main differences between rotaries and roundabouts.

And then to confuse matters further “traffic circles” are common as traffic calming devices on the west coast. These are also round, but are very small and do not have a splitter island preceding. They usually sit in the middle of small residential intersections.

Also, sometimes rotaries (the largest, fastest, and most dangerous of the trifecta of round traffic things) are sometimes called traffic circles, which are otherwise the smallest / slowest traffic device.

If all that is confusing, well, you’re not alone. My feeling is that roundabouts and traffic circles are good, but rotaries are just highway interchange supercolliders. Removing them from the northeast was very good.

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