Modern Roundabout!

I’ve written before of my love for “modern roundabouts”—the thinking man’s alternative to the dread traffic circle—but this was largely a theoretical proposition since we don’t have very many in the United States. So I was very excited when our bus drove around one in Freiberg.

The basic underlying idea is that instead of trying to use signals to create a false sense of security in an inherently dangerous situation, you need to design the road so as to psychologically demonstrate to everyone the need to drive in a calm, careful, and relatively slow manner. With everyone moving a bit slower, traffic as a whole can still proceed at a reasonable speed and you sharply reduce the kind of accidents that both kill people and produce severe congestion.