Re:We're excited about our new roundabout
by rob74 on Monday October 07, 2024 @02:42AM
(#41763372)
I'm living in Germany, where roundabouts are very popular with planners recently. I would say they definitely have their place, but they are also overused. The (smallish) city where I live has a bypass road where for some reason it was decided to use roundabouts (I suspect the same reason why it has so many tight curves - not wanting to purchase too much land). With the result that using the bypass is not much faster than driving through the town, so barely anyone uses it.
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Sometimes roundabouts are used to limit traffic speed, since you MUST slow down, while keeping the same flow (for the calculated traffic throughput). Maybe that was the purpose. Roundabouts are generally more expensive than intersections due to needing more land works and more land than a normal cross intersection.
Re:We're excited about our new roundabout
by steelframe on Monday October 07, 2024 @10:20AM
(#41766276)
> since you MUST slow down
Where I live some of the locals treat a newly-built roundabout like the Daytona Speedway. It's almost as if their mentality is that you must NOT slow down, and they won't hesitate to express their displeasure at you if you happen to be "in their way" going the 15mph speed limit through the roundabout.
I don't know if that was the purpose or just a side effect, but I would have thought that the purpose of a bypass is to provide a more attractive route than the one going through the town center (so motorists have an incentive to use it), and having to slow down at the roundabouts (along with the mentioned tight curves and the 60 km/h speed limit) completely destroys the attractivity.
Re:We're excited about our new roundabout
by skeeter2020 on Tuesday October 08, 2024 @11:12AM
(#41778219)
drivers may interpret it differently, but flow is typically faster than stop&go, plus the illusion of "if you're moving you're getting somewhere" helps.