Having driven in both, Americans don't take naturally to roundabouts and it would be difficult to teach all the existing drivers about them. Same in the UK when they add new rules: most drivers remain completely unaware of them.
The only difference is Americans aren't yet used to them because they're uncommon. You fix that by making them common. It's not like there's a genetic difference in Europe that makes them capable of roundabouts and Americans not.
Roundabouts were introduced in the UK back when car penetration was low and every learner for decades has been indoctrinated into how to use them. It's the education piece that's the problem. People don't intuitively understand roundabouts and you can't magically send that knowledge to millions of existing drivers.
In some sense you have to start sometime, but there's going to be pushback from the accidents and injuries that will certainly happen in the interim.
No, this is just making excuses for not building them. Once you start using them in an area even the drivers that have never used them before will figure out how they work. It’s not rocket science.
> there's going to be pushback from the accidents and injuries that will certainly happen in the interim.
In areas that have actually built lots of roundabouts the accident and injury rate dropped immediately. There was no interim period with higher accident rates.
There’s nothing complicated about roundabouts: entering it is like joining the traffic from a parking lot/your own driveway, exiting it is like exiting a highway.
You yield to traffic from the left, which mean someone from a leftward entrance has priority, but they can actually be blocked by other traffic. So you have to not only consider yielding to them, but also whether they are yielding to someone else, thus giving you space to go. I see this computation mess people up all the time.
Also, judging intentions is much harder. On a multi-lane highway, it's very clear when someone is cutting across lanes to exit. And there's only one place they can be exiting. On a multi-lane roundabout, they might be taking the exit before your entrance, or the one after. Often people won't be signalling, or even giving incorrect signals.
When joining as well, if I'm emerging onto a busy road with two lanes in the direction I'm going, I will probably accept joining when the nearest lane is clear, even if the next lane is not, as long as the cars there don't look to be moving into the nearest lane. On a roundabout people can peel off at any time, and you should really wait until there's a gap in all lanes.
