Roamer: The world goes round while we drive around roundabouts
Since reading the results of a survey last year my nerves jangle every time I approach a roundabout near my house.
With nearly 700 votes, Broadway’s ‘Balls on the Falls’ was voted worst in the Belfast Live survey of roundabouts, followed by Sandyknowes with just over 300 votes. Sandyknowes is virtually on my doorstep, so I run its gauntlet almost daily!
The other main contenders - Stockman's Lane, Shaftesbury Square and Carlisle Circus - attracted numerous uncomplimentary comments, but some of remarks about the survey’s two ‘winners’ thoroughly confirmed their ranking!
“I’ll drive extra miles just to avoid Broadway,” admitted a frazzled driver and “no matter how many times I try to remember which lane, it’s still the wrong one” said another. “It took me nearly five years to work it out,” an exhausted motorist confessed.
Someone wanted ‘Sandyknowes’ changed to ‘Nobodyknows’ and “planes and everything come at you on that thing!!!!” remarked a terrified driver, highlighting the roundabout’s proximity to Belfast International Airport.
“Sandyknowes can be terrifying” another motorist lamented, adding, “some days I think - this is how it will end!”
Presumably most of the daily 110,000 drivers navigating Place Charles de Gaulle around Paris’s Arc De Triomphe - arguably Europe’s most famous roundabout - share similar thoughts. But roundabouts are important in our culture.
In his poem The Sightseers, Paul Muldoon recalls a Sunday family-outing to “the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley, the first in mid-Ulster.” The rock band Yes had a major hit with a song called Roundabout in the early 1970s, and her book entitled ‘The Roundabout Man’ brought Birmingham-based author Clare Morrall rave reviews.It’s about a man who lived on a roundabout, which “would be a wonderful place to escape to” said Clare when her book was published in 2012.
Fine, if you’ve a choice, but some roundabouts virtually imprison drivers! Poland’s Rataje roundabout in Poznań - for trams, buses, cyclists, pedestrians, cars and juggernauts - is regarded as one of the world’s worst. Regular users claim it needs an instruction manual and one public representative suggested that the engineer who designed its road markings “should scrape them off the asphalt himself, with a razor blade!”
Whilst Rataje eclipses Broadway and Sandyknowes for awfulness, what about standards of driving? The UK-wide Roundabout Appreciation Society draws on a former children’s TV programme to describe three common approaches to roundabouts. The False-Start Florences “inch forward a bit but don’t make the decision to pull out completely. The person behind them assumes they are going further, so accelerates and crashes into the back of them.”
The Zebedees “bounce straight across roundabouts” and the Dillons “drive directly onto the middle of a roundabout because they didn't see it coming.”
The three Magic Roundabout manoeuvres don’t include one of the most common tactics revealed in last year’s Belfast Live survey - drivers who close their eyes entering a roundabout!
The international road safety and vehicle testing organisation DEKRA was founded in 1925 in Berlin - its name is abbreviated German for ‘Motor Vehicle Monitoring Association’. Several years ago the organisation published a list of the world’s ‘quirkiest’ roundabouts.
Top of the list and confirmed in the Guinness Book of Records is earth’s biggest roundabout, in Putrajaya, Malaysia, with a total circumference of over two miles! Putrajaya’s gigantic junction boasts 15 entry/exit points, three on the inside of the roundabout itself, and includes an integrated Royal retreat for the King of Malaysia, a lake, gardens, five-star hotel and a pink domed Mosque constructed from rose-coloured granite.
DEKRA’s ‘quirky’ list also features the Faroe Islands’ Eysturoyartunnilin, in English - the Eysturoy Tunnel, an undersea roundabout connecting the two largest islands, Streymoy and Eysturoy. Bielstrasse, in the Swiss town of Lyss, utilises a huge record player for its roundabout.
In Monheim am Rhein in Germany there’s a 40-feet-high geyser in the middle of a roundabout with the warning “only nature knows exactly when it will erupt again!” And finally, in Swindon in Wiltshire there really is a Magic Roundabout!
It consists of five small roundabouts arranged around a large one, with traffic running clockwise on the outer roundabouts and counterclockwise on the inner one, the so-called ‘contra-rotational hub’!
When it opened in 1972 accident rates dropped dramatically.