Anyhow why I am talking about roundabouts, we attended a meeting on Monday evening about the intersection up the road from us and we got talking to the officials that are sorting all the issues out regarding the intersection. We talked about many things, but we got to talking about roundabouts.
Pleased the say that a roundabout is not being considered for our particular intersection. The officials we were talking too were from the Kitchener/Waterloo and London, Ontario areas. I don't claim to know too much about the London area, but I am familiar with the Kitchener/Waterloo area and knew there were a number of roundabouts in that area. Turns out the Region of Waterloo are big on roundabouts and where possible they will install a roundabout instead of lights at an intersection. If you check this link it will show you have to navigate a roundabout. The officials are pushing roundabouts as a safer alternative for intersections.
Anyhow back to why I brought all of this up. In Caledon they have installed a roundabout in a bit of a strange place, basically in the middle of no where. It does however solve a problem and it is safer to navigate that intersection than it was. However there is one slight problem, a lot of people have no idea what so ever how to navigate a roundabout. As I was approaching it the other day there was a poor woman in a van driving round the roundabout, she even stopped at one stage to try and figure out what to do next....LOL Luckily for her, it was after the "rush hour" period, so no one else was using the roundabout.
I spoke with a friend later that day who has a daughter who has just passed her driving test, and asked her if there was instruction in the drivers handbook on using roundabouts and she said no. Now this is in Ontario, not sure what it is like in other provinces in Canada.
The one thing though we do not have to worry about in Canada is mini roundabouts:
Mind you when writing this post the word "magic roundabout" kept popping up and let me tell you that sort of roundabout scares me. Here is a link to one, confusing.........very...........
Do you like roundabouts? Do you know what to do when you approach a roundabout? What's your experiences with them?
This seems to be the latest thing to save energy and time, the Wonderbag. It looks interesting not sure when it will be available over here?
