Safe Speed Forums

You don't REALLY believe that, do you?!

So.. on a 4-lane mini roundabout, exits/entrances all two-way labelled clockwise for convenience 1, 2, 3 & 4, you're in car A approaching in 1 and another (car B) in 3, you want to go to 3, car B wants to go to 2 and is signalling right, with no other vehicles or pedestrians around. Do you (a) wait for car B as it is his right of way or (b) boot it knowing (!) he will have to slow down because of the poxy design of roundabout? I hope most/all of you said wait. For the one or two who didn't, expect an occasional clip from a cutter or very nimble and not too observant car B. For the rest of you who wait, would you prefer to wait for several seconds while the other chap slows to a snail's pace checking over his shoulder to make sure he doesn't clip the painted hump or for about 3-tenths while the other chap turns right sharpish by illegally but expediently straddling/wrongsiding? Incidentally, if I was driving car A, I'd wait without question. If I was driving car B, I would adopt the bluff and cave technique. ie, I would make as if to go, cutting the corner, and if carA had taken the hint (or was obviously and correctly giving way) I'd boot it over and we could both be on our way promptly. If car A kept coming, I'd cave and take the trip around the white dot. Simple!

IMO you are completely wrong here. It's the other way round. MRs are very often poorly designed leading to them becoming a hazard.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

I do have some photos of a mini roundabout which my sisters and brother do use. This used to be a T-junctions and had few accidents.

Since the mini-roundabout appeared.. there have been umpteen.

I think I should post the photos in the Near Miss section.. with no comment with the invitation to identify why crashes occur there.

Give me five to track down her e-mail to me and upload her photos..

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I think the disagreement here stems from the variety of ways that these things are implemented.

Someone here mentioned a 4 lane mini roundabout. I have a hard job picturing such abomination, but my guess would be they made the island smaller in order to squeeze an extra lane in there, so in reality it's actually quite a big roundabout. I guess it would be like negotiating 1/5th of the Magic Roundabout in Swindon.

Around here, and where I used to live, most mini roundabouts were adapted from T-junctions using the "splodge a bit of paint in the middle of this junction and put a couple of signs up" method. Some of these are on roads that can barely accommodate two cars side by side.

With this kind of junction, only one vehicle can be using the roundabout at any one given time, with the possible exception that you can squeeze a second car on if it comes from the same entrance as the first one. In any case the path that they take is irrelevant as there is no-one else on the junction to hit. In this case people choose the quickest and easiest path, the one that doesn't require them to hug the wall of someone's house and then swing a hard right narrowly avoiding taking someone's front bumper off. People that do attempt to negotiate the roundabout in that manner usually only try it once.

And it is that kind of roundabout that breeds contempt for them and disrespect for the rules surrounding them, for some people this leads to driving over them as a matter of principle, for others they just assume that you're supposed to do that since some of them can't be negotiated in any other way.

Personally I just see them as a T-junction with altered priorities, which is good because it helps with traffic flow. I will drive across them in the same way as I would have done if it were still a T-junction. The big exception to this is I will never attempt a nearside-nearside manoeuvre when the car opposite me wants to turn right, always offside-offside like the HC says you should do for T-Junctions too, but no-one ever does.

I knew I'd seen it somewhere!

"The significance of the signs and markings used at mini-roundabouts is now specified
in item 5 of the table in regulation 16 rather than in the caption beneath diagram
611.1 in Schedule 2. Because the previous requirement couldn’t be met by large
vehicles, the wording of the requirement has also been modified to make it clear that
a vehicle must go around the centre of a mini-roundabout unless its size, or the layout
of the junction makes it impracticable to do so. The revised requirement now
corresponds more closely with rule 164 in the current Highway Code."

From page 6

In my area, they are a failure because they are not needed. They're just another method of trying to slow traffic down.

Similarly to some traffic lights in my area - the ones that are badly phased/unnecessary are the ones that (some) people ignore or jump.

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Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus

I disagree. I believe some rules (or variants thereof) are invented deliberately in an attemp to hinder progress.

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Pecunia Prius Equitas et Salus