Hmm, no surprise - its missing any form of signage beyond stop signs. Despite being so much more common, you still get clear signifiers in the UK. e.g. you get "to the left please sir" blue and white direction signs on approach for all round-a-bouts:
There is obvious ambiguity between curvacious T-junctions and roundabouts so you really need some "go right you dude" and "I said right jerk" signage especially given how less common they are.
Interestingly that crazy looking magic roundabout serves a purpose. The (seemingly correct) theory was that such a setup would slow people down and make them cautious, thereby dispensing with the need for traffic lights and allowing safe self-organisation.
Haha, same here. (edit: not planning on visiting Swindon again after the first visit which involved some trouble with the 'magic' roundabout)
I was in turn: confused (as I wasn't expecting it), amused (as I had recently read a Wikipedia article about it), distracted (as I tried to explain it to my partner), shocked (when I got stopped by a policeman having inadvertently driven through a pedestrian traffic light), and angry (when I got 3 points on my license). I tried to explain that I had been distracted by the roundabout but to no avail.
Not really, there were no people crossing or waiting to cross... I went back to check and I missed it because it was a very wide road, there was a middle traffic light 'abovehead' which is how I missed it. I do actually agonise over these types of issues, and genuinely believe that at that moment I was not a danger to the public! Had it been a light at a junction it would have been much more dangerous, and also very difficult to miss. Also, having done some research afterwards, it appears that the Swindon police force were under a quota system so were actually targeting motorists, and therefore would exercise no discretion at all after seeing this occur.
One of the issues with roundabouts here (France) is that almost nobody is using their turn signals or use the wrong one (they activate the left one entering the roundabout and keep it on, making you think they'll keep on turning around when they're about to exit the roundabout.) When you're waiting to enter a roundabout it makes you wait a bit longer when a car is already turning around.
Signalling incorrectly on roundabouts is pretty common in the UK. In fact, I would say only a minority of drivers signal correctly when turning right at a roundabout.
I used to get pretty frustrated by it. I can't do anything about other people's bad driving habits.
I now try and pay more attention to the speed at which they approach the roundabout, and their lane positioning/angle. I probably take more "chances" because I drive an auto with a bit of grunt.
The UK is replacing many of its roundabouts with traffic signals in order to control the flow where one route across the junction dominates traffic density.
Simple domination doesn't seem like an adequate explanation. Is it the case that the dominant traffic pattern effectively monopolizes the roundabout making it difficult for other traffic to enter for significant periods of time?
That sounds like a poorly designed roundabout to me. One recently added to my relatively small city has a speed limit of 20 MPH (yes, I'm in the US) and much more than 20 MPH seems too fast to me simply as a result of the radius of the roundabout.
It is routes such as ring roads where effectively it is a crossroads with one of the crosses being 4-6 lanes wide at 40mph and the other being 2 lanes approaching at 30mph,
(though not always such a speed disparity).
So if you arrive from the 2 lane 30mph road you could have a very long wait time.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/8th+and+townsend,+san+fra...
And people would regularly go the wrong way around the damn thing.