102
this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
102 points (98.1% liked)
Fuck Cars
15634 readers
1376 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
i think the average american would die of shock if they came to visit me. just to get through town (as in just passing by) requires navigating on average 9 to 11 roundabouts, and that's on an E-road.
it's pretty obvious when using google maps for navigation that they don't really "get" roundabouts. it pipes up "take the second exit" in every roundabout where you need to go straight through.
Thank you for providing Wikipedia for e-roads
Hmm how suspiciously Milton Keynes of you....
We've had roundabouts all over the place for 20+ years at this point. I genuinely don't get why people still struggle so much with them.
But fwiw my town also requires several roundabouts to get through and it’s not very big. And almost every time an intersection needs work, we get a new roundabout.
However I actually do like the way the directions work in maps where it says “take the x exit” because a ton of roads aren't well marked in roundabouts, and there are some weird but decently common situations where the exit you'd think you need is not the right one. Thats just sort of what happens when you are retrofitting everything, and have space constraints.
but i mean, it doesn't say "continue straight" in every interchange. i don't know how other countries do it but we have being able to navigate by signage as a mandatory part of driving tests and it's always understood that no instructions given means "continue on your current course".
Sometimes my GPS will be like "go left up here," but left is actually straight and right is the exit. I think it's just seeing if I'm still awake.
It depends here, sometimes we genuinely do get a bunch of “continue straight to stay on xyz” for no obvious reason, and on highways with multiple off-ramps that split the existing lanes, it’s very common to get “use the middle lane to continue on xyz” so it’s not really as out of place as you might think. Our roads are just spaghetti garbage. Josh from Let’s Game It Out must have done the road planning.
And yes, navigating by signs is doable, but we are (were?) talking about navigation apps which provide excruciating detail, so thats a bit of a moot point. But where, specifically, they are marked changes, how well they are marked changes, and on many of them you can’t see signage at night until you are almost past it, and due to mostly being space-constrained retrofits, which exit you want from the roundabout isn't nearly as standardized as it should be, even to continue straight. Sometimes straight is the first exit, sometimes the third. Usually second. It’s not a super great implementation of the system, but the roads themselves aren't a whole lot better. Sometimes it is really really unclear what road you are already on, because only cross-streets are marked (as in you can’t see the signs for your road until you go through an intersection, and it might not be marked in a way you can see for several blocks if the intersections are with small quiet streets).. driving in general sucks, basically, and the maps direction to continue through the second exit is thus either welcome, or at least not a dealbreaker, for drivers here.
The more progressive and more well-planned small towns and cities around the US have actually been building out roundabouts for the better part of a decade now. When I go visit my parents in suburban Washington I go through 4 or 5 roundabouts between the highway and their house. Turns out you can get the majority of suburban Americans on board with a roundabout if you just point out that it means they probably won't have to stop and idle anymore. Also, usually cheaper.
I have mastered the Swindon Magic Roundabout.
I can take on anything now.
Magic roundabout not a problem.
Spiral roundabouts are constantly mis signed and are a menace if you've not driven them ten times already.
Same in medellin. Any big intersection is a roundabout. It really helps ease the traffic jams or as the locals call them “tacos”.
I mean... the second exit is usually going straight. So that makes sense. First exit would be a right turn (or left in the UK)
point being, they don't announce "keep going straight" at normal intersections