Drivers, apparently absolutely baffled by the idea that you have to go around the traffic island, instead drove en mass onto the wrong side of the road.īut it can be done. A couple of years ago a video from Rowan, a town in Kentucky which replaced an intersection with a roundabout, went viral. Real life efforts have not always gone well. In the episode of The Simpsons where the family visits London, Homer gets stuck on one for days, before eventually swerving off and crashing into Buckingham Palace. I admit, it will not be easy to persuade Americans of the magic of roundabouts. Since the 1990s, France has gone from having just a few hundred roundabouts to more than 30,000. And one of the ways they have done so is by installing roundabouts. But they have also literally rebuilt the roads to make it harder to crash. They have reduced the speed limits on minor roads, and installed thousands of speed cameras to ensure people stick to them. It is that France, unlike America, but like almost every other rich country on earth, has worked out how to make its roads safer. As I explain in my book, Carmageddon, the reason why is not that the French became better drivers. Now, Americans are three times more likely to die than the French. In fact, per mile driven, the French were actually slightly more likely to die in a fiery wreck. Thirty years ago, driving in America was not, by international standards, that dangerous. The average American has a 1 in 93 chance of dying in a car crash in their lifetime, and generally it is young people who die in car crashes. More Americans are killed just walking each year than died in the whole of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars put together. In 2021, 7,600 people were killed while walking (the highest number in 40 years). A growing share of those deaths are pedestrians. That is almost as many as are killed by guns, in total, including all murders and suicides. Last year, almost 43,000 people were killed in car crashes in the U.S., according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). The problem is that drivers keep killing people. Actually roundabouts should be installed almost everywhere in America.
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