Town Without Traffic Lights II

I’ve been to some small towns in France that have way too many of these traffic circles. They are a great convention, but can be abused in excess. In heavy traffic areas or times, some roads are simply to narrow/congested to support endless traffic circles.

Well I have no particular problem with roundabouts – here in Ireland the roads are littered with them – but one point to add:

“…trusting drivers to make the right decisions requires a belief in the wisdom of individual decisionmaking.”

But is this a sensible thing to believe? Coming to a roundabout I often tense up to prepare for the often difficult task of judging a complex flow of unpredictable traffic for opportunities to join. Scores of individual drivers are making scores of decisions with little room for error, and of course many do make mistakes. Including me – I was honked at recently for butting into a roundabout when I should have held back: a split-second decision turned out foolish.

So it would be good to see the numbers for traffic accidents in systems with more roundabouts versus systems with more traffic lights.

That said, the point is taken, and I’m grateful that I don’t have to wait at a red light when traffic is very light, for example.

It seems to me that the previous commenters are missing the point.

To be sure, traffic lights definitely produce traffic that is better-controlled. What I think Prof. Jones is getting at is that when these controls are eliminated, we don’t actually observe the mass confusion and potential carnage that was worrying us. This suggests our worries are off-base or perhaps over-blown.

Perhaps people are supposed to feel the anxiety of an occasional roundabout. Big SUVs, trucks, and traffic lights lull people into a safety that really does not exist. Driving is a dangerous activity. IIRC left turns at stop lights and merging into highways are the most dangerous parts.

I suspect that when accidents do occur, intersections with roundabouts are much less likely to result in fatalities because a reduction of the driver’s speed is in his own self interest (lest he plow into the circle). A mistake is a fender bender. Contrast that to someone trying to make it through a light that just turned red. I’d trade a little more anxiety for less t-bone fatalities any day.

a pretty libertarian guy writes “roundabouts are a huge source of anxiety to drivers.” You sound like you want to be told how to think and behave rather a lot for a libertarian!

Anxiety is why roundabouts work. A driver approaching a green traffic light just ignores other road users, puts his foot down and carries on regardless. A driver approaching the roundabouts in Poynton has to worry about schoolkids, wheelchair users, mums with prams, cyclists, blind people, etc., and just has to slow down and take his turn. A bit of anxiety stops accidents.

I live near a major junction in South London with a 4-lane traffic light junction just like the one in Poynton. The electricity to the lights occasionally goes out, and everyone behaves themselves and takes turns, like a four-way stop junction. Traffic always goes more smoothly on these days

Well, this opens a pretty big can of worms.

Shane L from Ireland says he dislikes roundabouts because he “often tense[s] up when approaching a roundabout”. How does this make road safety worse?

‘a pretty libertarian guy’ quotes Shane and goes on to say some remarkably un-libertarian things, as Neil points out. But he(APLG) too is at a loss to say why it is more dangerous. It’s more a matter of him liking freedom and hating responsibility.

It’s perhaps important to note that the Poynton system has TWO roundabouts where apparently one would do. This is the result of careful data gathering and simulation, something that perhaps has been lacking in the French adoption of roundabouts. Notice also how drivers ignore the so-called roundabouts in Poynton when they can get away with it.

Could it be that the debate between economic freedom and state control could take place on the roads? I think I know who would win.

I have never encountered a roundabout and I certainly hate waiting at a light with no traffic at all. But I wonder how 18-wheelers make out with roundabouts?

I want to back up neil.

Reduced control/instruction is thought to be safer precisely because it makes you nervous. You use your judgement and senses instead of blindly following the perceived all clear.

In Third World there is no contest. You need traffic lights (manned by traffic police) to have any semblance of order.
Otherwise, vehicles would clog each other to standstill.
This is no fancy talk but can be observed so any day in any big Third World city. No order without a policemen or two, not even at a traffic light.

I’ve been to Hanoi, and there was order, despite no one obeying traffic signs, and no policemen. However, my husband was there for 2 months and saw two accidents (I saw one), which was more than we’d expect to see in New Zealand in a similar time frame.

In Lower Hutt and Wellington, where I learnt to drive, roundabouts are common, but also so are traffic lights. The problem with roundabouts is indeed a continuous line of people going in one direction, stopping other directions from getting onto the roundabout.

Just to back up what awp and neil say, my understanding is that over-confidence is a common cause of accidents (and I can certainly think of plenty of incidents in my own past that support that!)

Another example of this might be Rochester, PA, which in the last two years replaced an extremely cumbersome 10-way (five roads) intersection with an oval roundabout. It was common to wait at this intersection for many minutes at a time (I frequently measured 5+ minute waits years ago), but the introduction of the roundabout and devolving the traffic flow decisions to individual drivers has definitely and drastically improved the efficiency of this intersection.

This notion of “Equality Streets” is nothing more than hatred of drivers, and especially of drivers’ quite rightful expectation that the rules of the road should always let them go as fast as safely possible.

This pathological hatred, like anti-sexual prudishness, is usually nothing more than “sour grapes” on the part of people who aren’t getting the benefit of that higher speed and thus want to unjustly deprive those who are.

The freedom movement needs to reject all such movements and the persons who join them.

I have no problem with reasonable traffic safety laws, but the laws were stricter than is reasonable 50 years ago, and accident rates are plenty low enough already. These new rules amount to acts of war against motorists, and will soon reap the defiance they justify (and maybe the ultimate response suggested by Locke).

I’m not sure Martin Cassini is right: roundabouts don’t need traffic lights to break up the traffic arriving at them, all you need to get on to a roundabout is for traffic on the roundabout to want to exit on to your road. If you are joining a busy roundabout from a road that very little traffic on the roundabout wants to use then you can have a very hard time getting on to the roundabout. In this case, traffic lights can help to some extent.