3 ms·

I feel like roundabouts are less frustrating than traffic lights, safer, and flow better.

by metabagel 3y ago

fnimick 3y ago
Only if you don't care about cyclists and pedestrians who now have no protected time to cross intersecting roads.
- ilyt 3y ago
  Good, they can pay attention for once. Traffic arriving to roundabout is slow enough anyway as you can't just "ride thru it" if it is a small one. And for big ones, well, you can just have traffic lights. Or not have passing for pedestrians in same place as for cars
- dageshi 3y ago
  The pedestrians/cyclists in the uk & france seem to manage?
- knutzui 3y ago
  In many cases, there will be pedestrian crosswalks on each exit/entrance to the roundabout. At least that's how I have experienced roundabouts in central Europe.
- livueta 3y ago
  > protected time to cross As a road runner and bike commuter in the before times who's been run over a couple of times, crosswalks are a shit idea that cause far more harm than good, full stop. Fuck crosswalks. This is actually a good example of what the article discusses, because there's only two possible states: one, in which there's little enough traffic that crossing normally is obvious and trivial, and two, where there's enough traffic that no quantity of flashing lights, neon striping, reflectors and such could ever make crossing truly safe. Staying alive on the roads without a death cage requires assuming that anyone in a car can and will ignore any rule at any time, because, eventually, someone will - and if you trusted that little green man to keep you alive, well, whoops. Crosswalks encourage the sort of head-down passivity in inherently dangerous situations that just gets people killed, and the more flashing shit you attach to them the more you alert fatigue drivers into ignoring them. Crosswalks are similar to speed limits in this context in that they're utterly ineffective but provide an excuse to not actually fix the problem, i.e. build a lot of nonvehicular overpasses/underpasses. The point of criticizing a rules-based approach to traffic safety isn't to encourage some orgy of vehicular homicide, but to move to actually workable solutions involving changing the built environment. And in my area, anyway, roundabouts are more likely to come with nonvehicular bypass structures than other forms of interchange. I'll take a roundabout + overpass over a traffic light + crosswalk every day of the week. In the most walkable places I've lived, that walkability was delivered not by an obsession with figuring out the precise set of rules or the precise enforcement mechanism needed to finally make it work, but by an acknowledgement that the sort of infrastructure you build is inextricably linked to how people use it. Build a stroad and you'll get pedestrian deaths regardless of the rules you try to layer on top of it. Build a walking bridge and you dodge the problem entirely.
toast0 3y ago
On the otherhand, I feel like roundabouts are more frustrating, and flow worse. I don't know about safer, my anecdotal evidence is much too sparse; I'm willing to accept they may be safer as they narrow the scope of collisions, mostly eliminating head-ons; although I have a lot more close calls with pedestrians in congested roundabouts: as a driver, I need to turn my head so I can look to the left (upstream) for a gap, while also looking right (downstream) for pedestrians which have many approaches and it's difficult to do both. A true scotsman roundabout moves the pedestrian crossings away, where pedestrians don't actually want to cross, which makes the conflicts easier, but only if the pedestrians follow the controls (but, if we're relying on people following controls, why not a traffic signal). I've been at roundabouts where there's a seemingly interminable number of cars from the entrance upstream of me that are exiting to exits downstream of me, and that's terribly frustrating, because there's no fairness mechanism. And then there's the many roundabouts shoehorned into much too small of a space.

I feel like roundabouts are less frustrating than traffic lights, safer, and flow better.

fnimick 3y ago

Only if you don't care about cyclists and pedestrians who now have no protected time to cross intersecting roads.

ilyt 3y ago
Good, they can pay attention for once. Traffic arriving to roundabout is slow enough anyway as you can't just "ride thru it" if it is a small one. And for big ones, well, you can just have traffic lights. Or not have passing for pedestrians in same place as for cars
dageshi 3y ago
The pedestrians/cyclists in the uk & france seem to manage?
knutzui 3y ago
In many cases, there will be pedestrian crosswalks on each exit/entrance to the roundabout. At least that's how I have experienced roundabouts in central Europe.
livueta 3y ago
> protected time to cross As a road runner and bike commuter in the before times who's been run over a couple of times, crosswalks are a shit idea that cause far more harm than good, full stop. Fuck crosswalks. This is actually a good example of what the article discusses, because there's only two possible states: one, in which there's little enough traffic that crossing normally is obvious and trivial, and two, where there's enough traffic that no quantity of flashing lights, neon striping, reflectors and such could ever make crossing truly safe. Staying alive on the roads without a death cage requires assuming that anyone in a car can and will ignore any rule at any time, because, eventually, someone will - and if you trusted that little green man to keep you alive, well, whoops. Crosswalks encourage the sort of head-down passivity in inherently dangerous situations that just gets people killed, and the more flashing shit you attach to them the more you alert fatigue drivers into ignoring them. Crosswalks are similar to speed limits in this context in that they're utterly ineffective but provide an excuse to not actually fix the problem, i.e. build a lot of nonvehicular overpasses/underpasses. The point of criticizing a rules-based approach to traffic safety isn't to encourage some orgy of vehicular homicide, but to move to actually workable solutions involving changing the built environment. And in my area, anyway, roundabouts are more likely to come with nonvehicular bypass structures than other forms of interchange. I'll take a roundabout + overpass over a traffic light + crosswalk every day of the week. In the most walkable places I've lived, that walkability was delivered not by an obsession with figuring out the precise set of rules or the precise enforcement mechanism needed to finally make it work, but by an acknowledgement that the sort of infrastructure you build is inextricably linked to how people use it. Build a stroad and you'll get pedestrian deaths regardless of the rules you try to layer on top of it. Build a walking bridge and you dodge the problem entirely.

toast0 3y ago

On the otherhand, I feel like roundabouts are more frustrating, and flow worse. I don't know about safer, my anecdotal evidence is much too sparse; I'm willing to accept they may be safer as they narrow the scope of collisions, mostly eliminating head-ons; although I have a lot more close calls with pedestrians in congested roundabouts: as a driver, I need to turn my head so I can look to the left (upstream) for a gap, while also looking right (downstream) for pedestrians which have many approaches and it's difficult to do both. A true scotsman roundabout moves the pedestrian crossings away, where pedestrians don't actually want to cross, which makes the conflicts easier, but only if the pedestrians follow the controls (but, if we're relying on people following controls, why not a traffic signal). I've been at roundabouts where there's a seemingly interminable number of cars from the entrance upstream of me that are exiting to exits downstream of me, and that's terribly frustrating, because there's no fairness mechanism. And then there's the many roundabouts shoehorned into much too small of a space.