I take the lane for the two busy 4-way stops between my house and Trader Joe’s, and cars either ignore the order of operations to let me go first, or they ignore the order of operations to cut me off. As soon as a bicycle enters the game, there’s a 100% chance the rules fall apart.
My experience with roundabouts is that I feel about 100,000,000,000,000x safer in them than I do any of Seattle’s totally uncontrolled 4-way intersections.
They are putting in a big ass roundabout at an interstate on-ramp near my house. Given how people already drive at the currently simple intersection, it would take a lot to convince me it will ever be safe to ride my bike through (though I guess I’m still gonna try it cuz yolo)
Roundabouts are undeniably safer than any signalized intersection, for any road user. At least in my opinion. It reduces the number of crossing streams to just one - look left and go if clear. As a cyclist I ride in the very middle of the lane and boat through.
Anyways, some fun stuff happened in Minneapolis this weekend:
Some new lanes were installed in a dense neighborhood, lots of boring normies are complaining, some jester started a fake protest event on Facebook as a hilarious joke, and a bunch of pathetic assholes showed up anyways.
Holy shit.
What is the idea behind the mongrelized intersections which are basically a 4 way intersection with a goddamn planter stuck in the middle, like they were trying to make a roundabout without any money? Is it just to slow everyone down?
Holy shit, “Nazi Lane”?!
That’s exactly the purpose, but they have the added benefit of turning into car ramps when drunk drivers plow thru them in the middle of the night.
We found the sign maker
Suck it lane
[quote=emor]Roundabouts are undeniably safer than any signalized intersection, for any road user. At least in my opinion. It reduces the number of crossing streams to just one - look left and go if clear. As a cyclist I ride in the very middle of the lane and boat through.
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All of this. Not counting on strangers to pay attention to not t-bone you. At worst, you’ll get sideswiped. The main roundabout in my neighborhood has 8 inlets and a tram stop in the middle so constant jay walkers. Works fine.
Generally I like roundabouts. Not that great to navigate one on a bike but not too terrible. Much better than a normal junction when you’re driving.
[quote=mdilthey]~1000 feet from my house, we have “The Spin Zone” double roundabout:
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That looks perfectly fine to me. Maybe it’s overkill, but if it gets shitloads of traffic then why not.
[quote=mdilthey]
And near my grandmother’s house in Eastern Mass. Four fucking lanes!
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Yeah that’s terrible. Roundabouts with two lanes are a horror show. By and large nobody knows how to use them. BTW there are two systems in Europe so if you’re in a foreign country you better find out which they employ. One is a half-assed “these are just normal traffic lanes so indicate and change lanes inside the roundabout as normal” and the other is the “outside lane is only for those taking the next exit”, which also means “go ahead and turn into a two-lane exit from the inside lane without looking, if there’s anyone in the outside lane they’ll be taking the exit alongside you”. It’s just a shitshow. If there’s gonna be two lanes, just paint a solid line between them or even put those flipper barrier things in there and make it clear that the outside lane is reserved for those taking the next exit.
Or just position your car so everyone knows which exit you’re heading for even before you signal. It’s not complicated until you make it complicated.
regarding the roundabouts: my commute in boston had about a half dozen roundabouts of varying degrees of death-itude. here is some stuff i know about them:
roundabouts are safer because they have less SEVERE crashes in them, not less crashes. i believe crashes are actually more common in roundabouts, although it tends to be the relatively innocuous sideswipe or clip, rather than the fatal left cross.
the problem with that is that i am not super enthusiastic about being sideswiped while on my bicycle. that’s panel damage in a car and could be real bad for my squishy human body.
ultimately i think where all incoming roads are roughly the same speed are preferable to four-way intersections. i think roundabouts where some users enter fast and others enter slow are an abomination and should never be allowed.
boston is currently in the process of putting a lot more lane lines and signage in the circles which they think makes them safer. i would agree.
Yeah that post makes no sense whatsoever with regard to this situation. If you care to actually read what I posted, you’ll find out that there are two different and perfectly “valid” ways to use two-lane roundabouts. If one guy uses one approach and the other uses the other, they have a pretty good chance of crashing. You can’t position your car so everyone knows which exit you’re heading for unless there’s a common understanding among everyone about how people get around in these things.
This is the roundabout that they’re going to build that has me worried:
On my bike, I’d either be entering at 12 o’clock or 6 o’clock on that diagram. It seems what they want you to do is break off onto those red bike paths and then cross an I-35 on-ramp at 90 degrees. Since drivers who would also be coming from 6 o’clock have nearly straight lines to either cross the roundabout or get on I-35, I can only imagine that they are going to be gunning it as people love to do here. At any other point I think cars will be going too fast to ever know if you can cross safely.
Now I’m probably going to be wrong but I’m worried that it’s going to be a complete shitshow and I don’t even hate roundabouts on principle.
That looks like one of the few places I’d actually get off the road onto the bike path and stop and use the zebra crossing to cross the road. Merging into that roundabout on a bike doesn’t seem like the smartest survival strategy.
There are some roundabouts here which have forced exit lanes, which removes the nice failsafe of a regular roundabout to say “whoops, actually that was my turn, I’ll catch it next time around” and turns it into “SHIT let me dart over unexpectedly”. It’s like the traffic engineers never saw a functional roundabout in practice.
IME, worst is full curb seperated lanes going into or out of the roundabout. i ended up on the wrong side of one of those once and it put me back on the freeway. i.e. two lanes enter roundabout, but right side one becomes curb separated and forces hard right onto freeway on ramp. there wasn’t an exit for something like 5 or 10 miles once you got onto the freeway. thankfully i was sort of going that way? (i had intended to stop for food, but couldn’t get to the burrito place due to being forced back onto the freeway. pretty sure i didnt even eat after that as i went into a no service zone and couldnt find any burritos.).
I will say that the roundabout on UMass’s campus and the roundabout near Look Park in Northampton are fucking perfect, and I love them. Definitely safer.
That double helix jammer I posted would probably be fine if 2/4 of the entrances weren’t 50mph, long stretches of intense downhill grades. Coming in from (in the photo) the bottom or the top right, cars are going very fast and do not give a shit about cyclists. Cars in either other entrance are coming out of residential neighborhoods or a grocery store parking lot, and are polite and slow.
I agree w/ fixed. Symmetrical speeds is important.