Roundabouts are slowly making Kansas City streets more confusing — and less deadly

Roundabouts are effective...but require significant cultural adjustment. They are popular in UK and EU, but not as much as US.

https://youtu.be/atORPw-w83I?si=A0ndI-CHnmxW8tpu

Interesting article. I would like to know the qualifications for a professor in traffic psychology. Starting my career in PennDOT as a Civil Engineer Transportation roadway designer we designed roads based on their classification (collector, arterial, etc.), ADT (average daily traffic), speed limit, percent truck traffic, their highest hour volume traffic for a typical day. I won’t get off into the weeds of the traffic studies that are needed to do this properly.

My take on roundabouts (what we used to call turning circles in the old days before they were eliminated, those of us old enough remember many) is they do cause less accidents primarily because they scare people, and they travel slower because of that. There are some other criteria for roundabouts such as each leg should have relatively equal volumes of traffic to work well and some other stuff. When not to use them: when the volumes of traffic are so high you will reach gridlock, then people get disgusted and start doing things that are bad for safety. When you can’t physically get from point A to Point B because of traffic volumes roundabouts are out.
My quick lesson for roundabout design. There’s a ton more of stuff. It would take days to go over everything. I condensed everything the best I could.