alt Hacker NewsI've been driving roundabouts for decades, and think they're great - they really help with traffic flow. I've never found them confusing.
I had to drive this specific Kirkland roundabout the other day, and ended up missing my offramp and going in completely the wrong direction. It's the most confusing roundabout I've ever seen.
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I live moments away from this roundabout. It's confusing. Single-lane roundabouts are really straightforward. You're either clear to enter, or you're not.
Adding lanes makes it far more confusing. I consider myself, you know, pretty smart. Not stupid, at least.
But I almost sideswiped someone in this roundabout the other day. Years of driving experience gave me an intuition that the middle lane would not cross over the outer lane. E.x. a car in the inner lane would not pass through the outer lane (except at the very end). So when I saw an oncoming car in the inner lane I thoguht I was safe to enter the outer lane. Not so. The inner lane car was actually lane-changing to the outer lane (at the exact point I was about to enter the roundabout) in order to exit.
There appear to be many such peanut roundabouts around the world, many of them in the US[1]
[1]https://panethos.wordpress.com/2024/06/14/working-list-peanu...