The Pros and Cons Of Roundabouts – And The Secrets Of Road Signs

March

25

1 comments

OnlineFOCUS readers interested in highways issues might enjoy this post here on the American website “Reality-Based Community”. It’s about roundabouts, which are generally uncommon in the USA.

Here’s a sample:

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an independent research group, estimates that converting intersections with traffic lights to roundabouts reduces all crashes by 37% and crashes that involve an injury by 75%. At traffic lights the most common accidents are faster, right-angled collisions. These crashes are eliminated with roundabouts because vehicles travel more slowly and in the same direction. The most common accident is a sideswipe, generally no more than a cosmetic annoyance.
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What locals like, though, is that it is on average far quicker to traverse a series of roundabouts than a similar number of stop lights. Indeed, one national study of ten intersections that could have been turned into roundabouts found that vehicle delays would have been reduced by 62-74% (nationally saving 325,000 hours of motorists? time annually). Moreover, because fewer vehicles had to wait for traffic lights, 235,000 gallons of fuel could have been saved….

Incidentally, one of the commenters to the post has provided a link to the UK Traffic Signs Manual. So if you really want to know the details of how signs – and road markings – should be, this is the place to look.

For example, the size of STOP signs depends on the traffic speed:

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