Observations on mini-roundabouts
Next time Gordon Brown is addressing the unlovely subject of Britishness he should think "mini-roundabouts". Is there any truer symbol of 21st-century Britain?
Mini-roundabouts are suburban, bossy little objects. They are imposed on us from on high, ostensibly for our own good (but just as possibly because they create work for consultants). Their introduction involves great cost and prolonged upheaval at the end of which you are left with a small lump, little bigger than an upturned saucer, on the Queen's highway.
On first consideration, mini-roundabouts look democratic. A passing socialist could no doubt draft a thesis claiming them as tools of the class war. These dented nipples in the roadway may indeed look like a device to allow "one car, one chance". It may seem as though they let each vehicle have its turn without preferment. The phutty Ford Ka or the sagging Datsun Cherry, laden with immigrants, can have as much of a voice at the mini-roundabout as the millionaire's purring Lexus. Is that not an achievement?
Be not deceived. Mini-roundabouts are a menace. They are an aesthetic blot. They kill the spirit of the road. And they cause car sickness, as the pongy interior of many a family hatchback will confirm.
They were invented by a 1960s transport ministry boffin, Frank Blackmore. He devised the equation Q=N/t (in which Q is the flow, N is the average number of vehicles in the system at any one moment and t is the average time taken by any vehicle to pass through the system). Do pay attention at the back of the class.
Comrade Blackmore believed that his invention would have us all zipping around town in our Hillman Imps. But did he envisage how prevalent mini-roundabouts would become? In August we spent two wet weeks in Brittany. The place has been near wrecked by mini-roundabouts. Bloody things. They were everywhere.
Blackmore created a monster, as anyone who lately has visited Swindon's "Magic Roundabout" junction (a moonscape of mini-roundabouts all stuck together) will agree. The mini-roundabout has run amok.
Mini-roundabouts have replaced ancient crossroads, once site of the gibbet and the wind-gnarled oak, more recently a place of sporting judgement. At crossroads you had to time your leap, gun your engine, make tyres squeal.
We could not all be Nigel Mansell but we could at least get our adrenalin pumping by darting out in front of an oncoming juggernaut. Why should only Mr Toad have some fun at the wheel?
At a crossroads, moreover, you had a sense of one road being senior to another. Should the busy A road not have priority over the piddling country lane? Not at a mini-roundabout it doesn't. Heavy traffic has to screech to a halt for even just one vehicle.
Mini-roundabouts are the very opposite of democratic. They are the many bending to the few. New Statesman readers should have no truck with them.
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