Observations on traffic engineering
The roundabout is in vogue. The architectural critic Joe Kerr devoted a recent Radio 4 programme to these circular roads with inaccessible central islands; a Poole driving instructor, Clive Greenaway, has founded the Roundabout Appreciation Society; and Roundabouts, a collection of work by the late photographer Andreas Zust, has been published on the Continent, fruit of a ten-year project conducted around the world, reflecting on "cultural and social differences, vernacular culture and man's horror of the void".
In Britain, the roundabout remains the bete noire of motorists who perhaps believe, wrongly, that they slow their journeys. In traffic engineering terms, driver delay at roundabouts has two components: "geometric delay", which means reduction of speed due to the physical attributes of the roundabout, and "service time", which means the delay caused by other vehicles. The combination of the two can make roundabouts seem a particularly tyrannical form of social engineering, perennially associated with clinically planned, anonymous public spaces.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in that equally derided product of postwar planning, the new town. Here drivers can lose all sense of direction, a problem that Milton Keynes has tried to solve by naming its roundabouts and allowing companies to sponsor them.
Lucky owners of the Milton Keynes 2004 Calendar can see the results. Caught between sarcasm and affection, the caption writers invite us to chortle along at their painstaking efforts to identify the differences of a series of roundabouts which are, by implication, all the same: the Bottledump roundabout is "quite a cutie", the Denbigh Hall Drive one is a "cheeky little blighter" and the Two Sisters roundabout "breathtaking".
Real aficionados will almost certainly own the prototype of the Milton Keynes calendar, produced in 2002 by BB Print Digital, a Redditch-based company. Roundabouts of Redditch achieved unlikely cult status after being featured on Channel 4's V Graham Norton since when, in addition to MK, it has been the inspiration for calendars covering the roundabouts of Swindon and Croydon.
The modern version of this piece of road engineering is a British invention, and a field in which we can claim international supremacy. In 1966, a new law stipulated that vehicles approaching the roundabout had to give way to traffic already on it. This law differentiated roundabouts from the more anarchic traffic circles, inaugurated in the United States and France in the early 1900s, where the constant weaving movements caused frequent hold-ups and accidents. A series of studies of traffic flow at roundabouts conducted by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory in the late 1960s and early 1970s made the British world experts in the field.
In the past two decades, roundabouts have become increasingly common around the world, especially in France where, at one point during the 1990s, they were being built at a rate of about a thousand a year. The case for them is compelling. They are less congested than signalled intersections, as they cut out unnecessary delays at traffic lights; they reduce fuel emissions because there is less stopping and starting; and in Britain, they obviate a dangerous traffic manoeuvre - turning right into oncom-ing traffic, with all the potentially lethal side-on impacts.
So, enough postmodern irony. Three honks for the roundabout, and get in lane.
Joe Moran teaches English and American studies at Liverpool John Moores University. His book Reading the Everyday will be published by Routledge next year
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