Erfurt’s Great Roundabout Experiment
by Volker Weber
[Thanks, Hajo]
Comments
I'm not sure who to call more stupid - the drivers not recognizing it or the city building such thing.
I just hope none of them ever tries to survive the Magic Roundabout in Swindon....
The problem is the roundabout is not raised so people can just drive over it. I don't know why people have such a big issue with roundabouts, better then the stupid 4 way stops over here. They cause traffic backups.
Aha: an old-skool roundabout, so without "priority on the the roundabout", and the drivers on the roundabout are correct they must give way to the people arriving at the roundabout as they're coming from the right. Total chaos.
Solution: Shark's teeth when you approach the roundabout. That's quite common now.
@armin: the magic roundabout is not as hard as it seems to be. I survived it already, and it was also the first time in my life, that I had to drive on the wrong side of the road ;)
I just wanted to see it with my own eyes (and find a geocache nearby) - but I missed an exit before the magic roundabout, so I had to go through ^^
great. I always wonder why people have problems driving through roundabouts. Is it because we are all schooled: right has priority?
where i work, we have a roundabout with compared a lot of impatient drivers so You never get priority when u are driving in the roundabout. thats very annoying.
and the solution in erfurt might be an obstacle in the middle. in Switzerland this is by law required.
As the British experience consistently shows, if you want people to treat roundabouts like roundabouts, you have to have plants growing in the middle of them.
I guess they did not have money for that. And there is also concern that lorries or busses are unable to make it around a small roundabout.
it was a usual xroad before and all they did was to paint was this lousy circle... ;-)
@Markus
I know, I've lived there for far too many years (and in case that wasn't obvious, I made the video). If you get scared drive the tourist route, but real hard men drive the pro driver route ;-)
Looks easy enough. From above.
I've seen both kinds of roundabouts in France recently. The ones with a flat center and a raised, planted center. The flat center roundabouts seem only to be used for very small crossings.
I don't know for sure, but looking at the locals you can just cross the center on a flat center roundabout if nobody else is in the roundabout, instead of circling around it.
But maybe the locals just didn't follow the rules.
Btw. I love roundabouts. A simple intuitive solution that works on par with a complicated/expensive solution.
Brilliant! :-)
Or, if not a coincidence... it could be part of a desperate viral marketing attempt by a company which logo can easily be spotted in the video all the time... ;-) Probably one reason to build the roundabout was to "better" direct the traffic which should have increased because of their business...
