this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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It's a significantly more efficient way for dealing with high-traffic in a cross-roads situation (though less safe than traffic signs) and pretty much a must if you get 5 or more roads converging and not enough to space to merge a few of those upstream.
However it takes some practice to be comfortable using them, plus they're most efficient when drivers reliably signal their intention to exit (because it allows people waiting to go in to know earlier that it's safe to do so).
Good signalling on roundabouts is basic driving skills you learn when getting your license, but for sure not everyone does it properly every time. In the Netherlands there's roundabouts that work around this by having physical lanes that dispatch the vehicles to the exits, so if you're trying to get in and see they're in that exit lane you can go in knowing there's no way they will stay on.
Well, I've lived in The Netherlands and I would say that the extra complexity of the bicycle path (which generally leads to a bicycle roundabout outside the car one) does push for having to help drivers a bit extra in the absence of traffic signs managing the thing (since anybody exiting the roundabout still has to give way to bicycles).
That said, even in my own native Portugal, were maybe 9 out of 10 of all drivers do not properly and reliably use the direction indicators (from personal experience I would say the quality of driving here is one of, if not THE, worst in Europe) roundabouts are all over the place, clearly help and don't seem to be any more accident prone than regular T and X junctions.
At least in Cities Skylines 1&2, where the player has a good overview of the behavior, they only work for low to medium amount of traffic. If you have one side sending in cars constantly, the others never get an opportunity to enter the roundabout, so there’s a traffic jam spanning through the whole city behind it.
Yeah, that's a good point.