SWINDON: This Boggles Me: A Magic Roundabout
I'M NORMALLY ALWAYS very confident in my skills to navigate a traffic circle/rotary/roundabout. But this thing? Hmmm. From today's washingtonpost.com chat with reporters Lyndsey Layton and Steven Ginsberg, I learn of the Magic Roundabout in Swindon, England, where five roads come together in a concentric ring of five traffic circles. For anyone who finds this stuff interesting, do spend some time gawking at the traffic circle photos at this website or at the diagram above. It'll blow your mind. I want a Magic Roundabout in D.C., just as an experiment to see how tourist drivers react.
5 Comments:
There's another one in Hemel Hempstead that's equally taxing. Glad I don't have to drive on it.
DC drivers are bad enough - not sure we want this huge monkey wrench!
Further complicating matters is that everything in that circle is going the wrong way and is on the wrong side. :-D Silly Europeans.
My grandfather died in a Roundabout. He got lost and lived inside of one for 14 years, living off of food littered from passing cars, until he died of old age.
He was 87.
This explains why the English band XTC -- whose members are from Swindon -- once wrote a song called "English Roundabout." The song, which is on their 1982 release "English Settelement," seems be a metaphor about how life is a big roundabout. But maybe they were being literal.
I drive through the magic roundabout twice a day, it's not that tough if you treat each roundabout in it's own right.... :)
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