General Road and Highway Discussion

[danbrotherston]

By the chunks out of the hydro poles around the roundabout at Margaret and Union (https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.4672537,-...312!8i6656 and https://www.google.ca/maps/@43.467255,-8...312!8i6656), it's clear some large vehicles have difficulty maneuvering this tighter roundabout.

Looking at that damage, I'm pretty sure it was some large truck making a right-hand turn, not negotiating the roundabout

It does appear to be right turn damage.  Of course, it's still not a good idea to design our roadways bigger to accommodate bad drivers, it should be well known by now, that such design choices only exasperate the problem.  

As for the rest, the centre is intentionally mountable.  Probably some vehicles take it too far, and lazily run over the middle and landscaping would fix this (no matter the screaming and terror that such scenery seems to elicit from various comment sections).

@kps  Yes, I have seen those, I think that's a fantastic design, and I hope one day we can get to that point.

Interestingly, in the Netherlands, many intersections do not even bother with the roundabout, instead preferring to have low speed intersections be entirely uncontrolled and rely on "default priority", something which, although it actually does appear in the HTA, I'm willing to bet less than 1% of drivers know about, hell, I wonder if a substantial portion of police officers are aware of this law.

In any case, for the majority here, "default priority" is basically the opposite of a traffic circle.  In countries where traffic drives on the right hand side of the road, a vehicle approaching an intersection with default priority must yield to vehicle approaching on the right. Basically, it's a 4-way "yield" sign.

Sadly, given that even 1 way yield signs seem beyond some drivers here, I fear it will be a long time before such simple, cheap, easy, and common sense designs will work here.

It of course doesn't help that at least in the Netherlands, these intersections were generally 30 km/h, and, not the pretend 30km/h zones we ever so rarely see here.