
The strange magic of Swindon’s seven-in-one roundabout - sphericalgames
https://drivetribe.com/p/the-strange-magic-of-swindons-7-e8gdewkCRaaWk5ZfAeiFEg?iid=Yno6Ck8DQgSx_TyrWe_35Q
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TheOtherHobbes
I used to live close enough to this to drive over it occasionally.

When it's busy traffic is literally coming at you from three directions, the
geometry isn't obvious or intuitive, and none of the usual rules apply.

It _always_ had glass from collisions on it.

~~~
mojuba
Roundabouts have an extra mental tax on drivers, something that's often
disregarded in this kind of debates. You should be more alert, more aware of
your surroundings, decisions are tougher to make (move? or not yet?). This
7-in-1 roundabout seems to be taking that to the extreme. I can imagine how
uncomfortable and challenging it must be to cross it, especially for drivers
who are not familiar with it.

Now compare that to regulated intersections, which come at a price of
potentially longer delays of course, but in return have much lower mental tax
on drivers.

~~~
eutectic
Once you are used to them roundabouts are for the most part pleasant to use,
and safer than intersections. It's especially nice not to have to turn across
incoming traffic.

~~~
tim333
Yeah I'd put them as about the 2nd least taxing junction. Slip lanes are
probably easiest, then regular roundabouts then stop lights then normal cross
roads/intersections.

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mabbo
Hemel Hempstead, North of London, has an even better one.

[https://goo.gl/maps/aAq7pzA45eR2](https://goo.gl/maps/aAq7pzA45eR2)

It's actually 6 roundabouts forming a seventh (the Swindon one is only five
forming a sixth) and it's also over a waterway.

As the taxi drove us through that madness, my boss turned to me and said
"okay, you were right, it's best we didn't rent a car and try to drive to
ourselves".

~~~
laumars
It's not the number of roundabouts that makes Swindon hard, it's the number of
lanes per junction and the proximity of the spot islands to each other.

For reference, Colchester also has a "magic roundabout" with the same
structure of Hemel's but Swindon's is easily the worst of the 3 because the
whole thing operates as one junction due to how tightly packed the roundabouts
are. Whereas Hemel and Colchester can be treated as 6 and 5 (respectively)
separate junctions circling an island. That makes a _huge_ difference when
driving around these kinds of roundabouts.

~~~
mabbo
My taxi driver at Hemel decided the inner circle was one giant American
roundabout and ignored the other little ones.

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ZenoArrow
Swindon is rural England? It's the 10th biggest town in the UK, with a
population that exceeds some cities. Pretty much the only reason it's not a
city is the archaic rule that cities have to have a cathedral.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8705932/Britai...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/8705932/Britains-20-biggest-
towns.html)

~~~
circular_logic
This is a common misconception that I stumbled upon a few months ago.

    
    
      -  The cathedral requirement was only to the 19th Century.
    
      -  Size does not matter. For example St Davids is a city with only 1,600 inhabitants
    
      -  A city in the UK is a place that has been granted city status by the monarch.
    
      -  You can loose city status for similar arbitrary reasons
    
      -  London is not even a fucking city in this system!
    
    

UK city definition is perhaps one of the dumbest concepts in the UK due to its
disparity with the populations expectation of actual criteria.

Sources:

    
    
      -  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-13841482
    
      -  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_status_in_the_United_Kingdom

~~~
timthorn
> London is not even a city in this system!

Well, there is the City of London aka the Square Mile, as well as the City of
Westminster.

~~~
circular_logic
Yes with populations of 9,400 and 247,600 respectively. They seem to
invalidate the rest of the city from city status.

------
fanf2
There are several magic roundabouts - I grew up near High Wycombe which has
one.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout#Magic_roundabout](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout#Magic_roundabout)

The Swindon one is notable because it was the first, and because it has the
tightest geometry, which makes it harder to see how it works.

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huhtenberg
"Only one _fatal_ crash in five years." (mentioned in video)

That's hardly a good fact to support the claim that roundabouts are safer that
well-regulated conventional intersections... which they are actually, and more
efficient in terms of the traffic flow. But the "1 fatality in 5 years" is an
useless data point that proves absolutely nothing.

~~~
ErrantX
It seems such a meaningless metric; of the three roundabouts around my town
(one of which is very large, has no lanes and is surprisingly fast) there has
been no fatal accidents as long as I recall (~8 years).

There has, however, been plenty of prangs.

My family use to live near Swindon - that roundabout is terrible for accidents
when people get in the wrong lane and cut across. It's just that they tend to
be slighter bumps due to the low speed.

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Theodores
My keychain fob is a tourist special - the Magic Roundabout, Swindon.

A few things about the Magic Roundabout:

If you are a rail user then you will inevitably have rail replacement bus
services that will inevitably give you a free tour of the Magic Roundabout.
You can get on the top deck at the front and witness the awesomeness of the
roundabout precariously but with a good view.

By bicycle the Magic Roundabout is a bit daunting but okay due to the low
traffic speed and the expectation of other road users for you to be having no
idea what you are doing.

What is not quite ever easy to come to terms with is that you are effectively
driving on the right, not the left, as far as on-coming traffic is concerned.
This is not normal for UK traffic situations, you always drive on the left in
the UK and expect on-coming traffic to be to the right, not left.

Swindon is great, for a while I used to tell people I went there for my
shopping because it was the largest town without a bookshop.

~~~
joshvm
There's been a Waterstones in the Brunel Centre for at least a couple of
decades. Proper bookshop though, sadly not.

------
ry_ry
Is Swindon _really_ better known for its art galleries than its ludicrous
roundabout? It does have a massive train museum though, if you like that sort
of thing.

Fun fact: you can go the wrong way around the magic roundabout due to its
lovecraftian geometry.

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nimbix
Do most people just simply ignore the outer roundabouts? Otherwise I don't
know how to explain this picture: [https://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/wired_see-h...](https://www.wired.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/08/wired_see-how-an-insane-7-circle-roundabout-actually-
works-1.jpg)

There's a group of cars on the very right simply driving through the
roundabout instead of around the center dot; and the two red cars on the left
side of the image also couldn't have ended up where they are without ignoring
the roundabout right behind them.

~~~
aaronds
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but that photo appears to be from some
sort of staged shoot, which probably explains why it's not being used as you'd
expect.

Edit: Here's another photo that appears to be from the same event
[http://matrixdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/MTX_MAGIC_...](http://matrixdaily.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/07/MTX_MAGIC_ROUNDABOUT_162205_14.jpg)

And a photo of the roundabout in a more typical setting:
[http://www.boostinspiration.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/S...](http://www.boostinspiration.com/wp-
content/uploads/2011/06/SwindonEngland.jpg)

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blowski
Interesting topic but the article itself has no detail, just lots of
advertising.

~~~
Jetroid
That, and the video had that very insulting 'brexit' joke. Poor taste.

~~~
andybak
Are we insulted at the mere mention of Brexit by non-Brits now? How bizarre.

(Actually - that gives me hope. If the shame gets too much, we as a nation
might do the most British thing and quietly pretend it never happened)

~~~
Jetroid
It's more that they're shoehorning such a divisive political event into an
otherwise completely unrelated article that insults me.

The connection is tenuous - brexit only being mentioned because it happened in
Britain.

It just gave me the distasteful feeling that brexit was the only part of
british culture - other than our penchant for roundabouts - that this
commentator knew about. Part of british culture that half of the country
probably still feels burned by.

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tim333
The history is kinda interesting

>Mini-roundabouts were developed by the Road Research Laboratory in the early
1970s as an experiment into whether the success of the priority-to-the-right
rule at larger roundabout junctions could be applied to locations where there
wasn't enough space to install a full-size roundabout. By summer 1971, 33 were
in use across Britain.

>[Frank] Blackmore pursued this discovery, noting that the design was also
superior to signalised junctions, following a Peterborough experiment where an
extra 1,000 vehicles could be handled every hour by a new small roundabout at
a previously signalised T-junction. He started to wonder if several small
roundabouts could be linked to improve more complex junctions.

>...Blackmore didn't give up, [...] and in 1972 gave Britain a new design of
Ring Junction. It was supposed to be in Birmingham, but the Council there was
unable to fund the scheme, and so the RRL was invited to try its new design at
a congested roundabout near Swindon town centre. For the first time, traffic
could flow both ways right around the central island, meaning that if one side
was congested, the other side could take up the slack. After a few days of
Police control, in which time RRL researchers logged events from a crane-
mounted camera, the experiment was branded a success.

>[It] is one of the few places where the jams have never really returned
despite forty years of traffic growth.

>...They also have an excellent safety record, probably because all traffic is
moving too slowly to do any real damage in the event of a collision.

from [http://www.cbrd.co.uk/articles/the-magic-
roundabout/](http://www.cbrd.co.uk/articles/the-magic-roundabout/)

see also an obituary tribute [http://www.mini-
roundabout.com/tribute.htm](http://www.mini-roundabout.com/tribute.htm)

Quite a colourful history for a roundabout guy - Born and brought up an expat
in Algeria, studied engineering in Switzerland, RAF pilot in WW2 getting an
Air Force Cross, became an Air Attaché in Beirut where duties included bugging
the Russians next door with holes drilled through the wall. Then roundabouts.

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zapperdapper
I used to live just south of Swindon and use to go across the Magic Roundabout
regularly. It is _completely nuts_. My technique was just to put my foot down,
go straight across and just pray - somehow I survived it. Even been across it
multiple times in a Luton Van - at least cars give you a wide berth...

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GhostVII
> It's even safer than a normal roundabout too, for one simple reason: traffic
> moves through it too slowly to actually cause an accident.

That seems like more of a negative than a positive... You can improve the
safety of any intersection by designing it in a way that forces people to go
slow, but we don't because we like to get places quickly.

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sofaofthedamned
I used to live and work in Swindon years ago, the roundabout is actually
really easy to use once you get the hang of it. Best thing is there's always a
route to keep moving, so it does keep traffic flowing.

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palpatine_an
I drove through this once, it was an absolute terror. I ended up cutting
across it without even realizing.

