Originally published at: Do roundabouts cause tornadoes? Man wants to know | Boing Boing
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I hope this poor chap hasn’t been shown footage of any Nascar races, recently.
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This is a bit too on the nose to be real, but in these days of MAGAts I’m open to the possibility I could be wrong.
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I thought it was settled science that high concentrations of mobile homes caused tornados. If it turns out to be roundabouts I’m going to be nearly as shaken as by what science has done to the dinosaurs of my childhood.
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About 30 a year in the UK, but not so destructive, must be because we drive the opposite way round roundabouts which, logically, slows them down.
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Exactly what I was thinking. And also thinking people are just profoundly, deeply, achingly DUMB.
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Only if there are too many boxy, oversized vehicles on them.
Protect your community from the devil’s funnels by using public transit or driving smaller, sleeker cars!!!
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What was that accent though?
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I live in the UK and can confirm that the tornado situation here is terrible. I lost both my parents to a tornado three years ago, and my dog two years ago. I never actually had a dog, it was just a stray that was dropped by a tornado earlier that day (and broke my arm as it landed on me), so it probably counts.
The last tornado here was just three days ago. It destroyed my workplace, closed the long running musical “Wicked”, caused a shortage of truck drivers, reset the password on my wifi at home and ate all the cheese in my fridge.
Our local council had a tornado alert siren, but it got destroyed by a bolt of lightning. It turns out that the tornados are now outsourcing their smaller acts of random petty destruction, which probably explains the thunderstorm that’s flooded my street and set fire to all the bins.
Seriously, the tornados are angry that they’ve lost their near-monopoly on circular motions, and they’re not going to forgive us any time soon.
But we’re stubborn here in the UK. We like our roundabouts, and we’re prepared to make sacrifices to keep them. We feel that it builds character…
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Yeah, they’ve retired all of them in favour of the Eurofighter Typhoon and some F-35s.
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You’re wrong. The endumbenning is upon us.
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This is the plot of the next installment of the “Fast and Furious” franchise.
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Yep. It’s hell. Some councils tried to dilute the effect with things like this, but it just made things worse, with localised eddies multiplying the tornado force.
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Yeah, it is probably some interaction of traffic direction and the Coriolis Effect. 
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Where does this Coriolis feller live so we can protest at his house ?
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At first I was going to say rural Canadian, but now I’m thinking Minnesota.
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I would have never guessed central Pennsylvania!
Can report that these are properly termed a “traffic circle” in the US.
Which is suspiciously close to crop circle.
And they also seem to appear mysteriously over night.
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