Does your city have traffic circles? Roundabouts?

Piffka--we have lots of them in Seattle. They function in my neighborhood to channel through traffic to arterials. They work well, I think.

Four-ways are relatively easy to figure out, but there are some by Green Lake that are hellish. There must be six or seven options; I avoid the area at all costs....

Swindon's circle is magic, free flow traffic.

I think Circles have their place and work beautifully in many places but I can see they also fail miserably if not used correctly, in design or driving.

Oh, Walter... you don't want to know... We might need an exorcism or something.

I've thought that a traffic circle where each high-volume incoming entrance had it's own lane that joined the circle would be good... it would mean that the lane you came in on might not be the outer lane when you were ready to exit. (Does that make sense?)

Our roundabouts have double lanes but hardly anyone uses the inner lane because they want to be ready to exit.

It hadn't occurred to me that roundabouts would be less expensive to build and run, but that's probably true. In the UK there were some roundabouts that were just bumps in the road. You could just go straight through, but of course the well-behaved Brits carefully followed the circle (and so did we).

We call them diverters...

You should have tried the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, before they rebuilt the traffic lights: eight (8) more or less official lanes = about 12+ cars side on side. (A taxi driver asked my friend and me, if we were French in German car. :wink: )(We thought of a carrer with the Hell's Drivers afterwards. )

ah walter. the arc de triumph. reminds me off marble arch in london. real white knuckle rides.
eyes closed and hit the gas ?????

I drove round the paris inner perifique a few years ago. a 60mph parking lot, now that's a phun ride

Well, I got my strafers license after driving in and around Paris in the early 70's

5 exits is nothing!! they can have several more than that- ours can have 3 lanes going round and sometimes more - each lane in that case is clearly marked so that you know which one to be in.

the spots on the road are called mini-roundabouts and are used at very small junctions to give people equal chances (they are a pain!)

In the UK in the 70's they experimented with a complex roundabout involving a square of 4 mini roundabouts. In their infinite wisdom the traffic authorities placed one on the Colchester bypass which is 20 miles along the main road from the port of Harwich to London. So picture the scene when these poor guys who had just learned to drive on the left got to this contraption !

What is a strafers license?

Might have been a bad tranlation be me

What I wanted to say -in my fine humour - is that I got a licence for piloting low-flying military aircrafts.

Walter, do you mean a chauffeur's license?

No, no. I really meant a pilot license - you should have seen the traffic in those days ... and how the French drive (drove) ... and Walter.

Funny, I was imaging a limo, all done up like a tank, plodding it's way thru traffic. ha ha

Well, some French said, my friend and I were driving "as if".

I knew what you meant, Walter. Like that famous German WWI pilot, the Red Baron, right?

An equal chance at what... an accident? I remember driving some place north of London and blowing right through one of those, as an outraged driver in a Jaguar yelled obscenities at me. As an American I was having a hard enough time remembering I was on the "wrong" side of the road.

I probably was a public menace.

Correct - it was the time of "Snoopy vs. The Red Baron" by the Royal Guardsmen ... (a little bit later, but that was one of our favourites ... [besides 'Napoleon the 14th' "They're coming to take me away haha"]).

<sigh>

Here you go: