As a child, I lived in England for a brief stint (around a year) because my dad was transferred to his company's British branch. We lived somewhere near the Magic Roundabout (Bovingdon, which I think is pretty close).<p>We had just moved, so both of my parents were still getting used to driving on the opposite side of the road. And roundabouts in general. I have fond memories of my mom getting stuck on the Magic Roundabout for about an hour, too terrified to leave. So we just kept going round and round and round. Being a small child (3 or 4 years old), I just kept telling her every-time we passed the same building.<p><i>"Mommy! There's that building again!".</i><p>I'm sure she wanted to reach back and strangle me. When she eventually mustered the courage to exit...she did something wrong and we stopped up the whole roundabout. I don't actually remember that part, but she claims traffic basically ground to a halt until she maneuvered her car out of traffic.<p>Fond memories =)<p>Edit: Based on another commenter, looks like it was the "Plough" roundabout, not the one in this article. Whoops!
This is basically two normal roundabouts, one inside the other, with traffic direction the opposite way in the inner lane. Or a two-lane roundabout. It allows you to spend less time on the roundabout if you want to take the junction to your right, as you would usually have to go to your left and do an almost complete lap.<p>Compare reaching your parent on a singly-linked list to a doubly-linked list. Being able to traverse in either direction may provide significant performance boosts...
I used to live close to this one: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Colchester)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Colchester)</a> - it's actually very easy to do, and is really nothing more than a road that happens to run in a loop and has 5 small roundabouts on it. The junction in the current configuration works a lot better than it did when it was a large regular roundabout, as the pattern of traffic made it almost completely impossible to enter the roundabout at some of the entrances.
After studying it for a bit it isn't too difficult to figure out how it works, and I'm sure if you drove through it every day it would even become boring, but if I encountered this roundabout blind without knowing anything about it I'd probably cause some sort of accident.
Raleigh, NC installed a two-lane roundabout a couple years ago[1]. Drivers could not handle it[2] (almost daily crashes) and it had to be reduced to a single-lane roundabout[3]. I can't imagine what Raleigh drivers would do faced with the Magic Roundabout.<p>1. <a href="http://www2.acs.ncsu.edu/trans/planning/construction/Brochure%20revised%206-16-10_1.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www2.acs.ncsu.edu/trans/planning/construction/Brochur...</a><p>2. <a href="http://www.raleighpublicrecord.org/news/2011/09/12/accident-numbers-at-hillsborough-roundabout-higher-than-expected/" rel="nofollow">http://www.raleighpublicrecord.org/news/2011/09/12/accident-...</a><p>3. <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/25/2218567/crash-prone-roundabout-in-raleigh.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/07/25/2218567/crash-prone-r...</a>
I wonder if the 5/4 meter of the XTC song "English Roundabout" <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akrD84P_zxU" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akrD84P_zxU</a> (they're from Swindon and the Wikipedia page mentions that the song is a tribute) is a reference to the 5 external roundabouts.
I have been there once. It was the scariest roundabout I have traversed. The contra rotating flow (inside goes one way, outside goes the other) makes it extra exciting.
being from Swindon, I'm very proud to see this on the frontpage of hacker news! I took my driving test on it...<p>It's actually a lot easier to navigate than it looks, you can essentially treat the whole thing as one giant roundabout by taking the second exit on each mini-roundabout.
I went round a similar system first thing on Tuesday morning, the Plough roundabout in Hemel Hempstead:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempstead)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Hemel_Hempste...</a><p>Driving through was surprisingly easy (not to mention efficient), especially given how chaotic morning rush-hour driving can be.
If you consider that I'm from the part of the world where everybody is driving on the right side (see what I did there?:) of the road, it was not a complete disaster. Up and close this magic roundabout actually is not so magic - just one large roundabout with few smaller entry/exit roundabouts. Though, first timers could easily drive round and round for a while.
Similarly interesting/confusing is the Traffic Light Tree that was in Canary Wharf, London. It's recently been removed to make way for some roadworks.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Light_tree" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_Light_tree</a><p>Note that it's art rather than something functional.
We have a similar roundabout in Colchester where your driving instructor would take you if you were being cocky. It is actually incredibly easy to use if you treat it as a load of mini roundabouts.
It's funny how this ended up on here - this article about "nail houses" was recently posted today: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4915398" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4915398</a><p>The magic roundabout is mentioned in another posting on that same site:
<a href="http://www.theworldgeography.com/2011/08/top-10-strange-streets-of-world.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.theworldgeography.com/2011/08/top-10-strange-stre...</a>
We must go deeper. But seriously, are they all that rare? There's one similar just down the road from me (Colchester) and it's a pain when you're learning to drive.