Considering NZ’s small and windy yet 100kph roads, and adding on the Kiwi tendency to pass at the slightest provocation in insane situations, this is a terrifying idea.
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New Jersey used to have all kinds of complex roundabouts, though many of them got replaced with intersections and stoplights due to federal bullying. Traffic circles just work, as long as the traffic levels aren’t too high, unless you start running roads across the middle, sometimes with stoplights. There was one near Camden that looked like the Ballantine Beer 3-interlocking-rings logo. (This was the 70s or 80s, when we still remembered Ballantine Beer.)
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There is another one in Hatfield, Hartfordshire. My mum used to take a completely different route through the town to avoid the roundabout entirely. I’ve not found it much of a problem.
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I don’t understand why the US seems to pick on the Swindon roundabout as the complicated one. It has five roads entering a central roundabout. Hemel Hempstead has six. I go through that one from time to time. It’s fine so long as you know which road is your exit. I’ve got it wrong once or twice. The signposting is pretty good, to be honest - it’s just a case of driver panic. But as far as complicated roundabouts go, Swindon takes second place.
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When I was a student in Birmingham, I lived near the Gravelly Hill Interchange (AKA Spaghetti Junction).
From wikipedia: “The junction provides access to and from the A38 (Tyburn Road), A38(M) (Aston Expressway), the A5127 (Lichfield Road/Gravelly Hill), and several unclassified local roads. It covers 30 acres (12 ha), serves 18 routes and includes 4 km (2.5 mi) of slip roads, but only 1 km (0.6 mi) of the M6 itself. Across 5 different levels, it has 559 concrete columns, reaching up to 24.4 m (80 ft). The engineers had to elevate 21.7 km (13.5 mi) of motorway to accommodate two railway lines, three canals, and two rivers.”
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"I’d imagine it would take a few turns to get used to it."
I’ve only driven round it once (in common with most Brits, I try and avoid Swindon if at all possible), and I wasn’t intending to go that way, so I wasn’t prepared and I found it no worse than any other complicated road junction.
As for driving a UK car in France, that also seemed to be pretty straight-forward, but perhaps years of driving on the right in games like GTA has taught my brain how to drive on the wrong side?
(I did monetarily get confused when I got back to the UK and came to a roundabout, but as it was a mini one I just drove straight over it)
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If you fancy a simpler roundabout, here you go.
(An actual one that’s in my town)
Apparently it was built for a third road that got cancelled.
Behold the wonder of the two exit roundabout, or alternately: The most overly complex bend in a road ever 
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I never understood people’s problems with (normal) roundabouts. What’s so hard? You wait for a free spot to get on, than you drive around it and then you get off when you’re at the exit you want. Didn’t quite catch the signs? Just do another round, easypeasy.
Could you explain why it’s scary to you (genuinely interested)?
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Sure. If the light is red most people come to a full stop and wait their turn until the light changes. In a traffic circle, people are effectively being asked to decide on their own when it’s safe to enter/merge/signal/change lanes/exit. They don’t do this as reliably as just obeying a binary stop/go signal. Arguably, they have to make those decisions on other types of road features (a four way stop, perhaps). However, they have to make fewer critical choices at once, and it’s easier to keep myself out of harms way. It’s my distrust of other people’s behavior on the road that makes roundabouts annoying and occasionally stressful to me.
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That’s what I’ve heard as well, but mostly as praise - SimCity (2013) was sadly not very good, and C:S showed up not that much later and basically fixed every complaint people had about it. It’s got a huge map, the people actually move around on their own sensible and unique routes, between their specific workplaces and employers (and shops and recreations), there’s no silly “electricity moves arounds like blogs of goop” system, the public transport system is more detailed, more specific, and more interesting (as is the road/traffic system) … it even looks better, arguably.
That’s not to say that C:S is perfect in every way; it’s more of a sandbox and less of a challenge than any SimCity. You tend to fairly early get the money you need, and from there on it’s more about making the traffic and public transport work well and indulging your inner landscape architect. The scenarios in the natural catastrophes DLC help a bit with that, some of them add a fair bit of urgency.
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I had my first taste of roundabouts about 17 years ago, on a trip to the UK. I rented a car, and it was a good thing I looked up their rules of the road before I went. Some things I found were a bit non-intuitive (like straddling the centerline on a wide two-lane road to pass). Also, the centerline ALWAYS being white; in the US a white centerline indicates one-way traffic, with yellow for two-way.
Once I got used to roundabouts, I couldn’t stand the four-way stops that are ubiquitous in the US. Indeed, stop signs are quite a bit less common in the UK.
Overall, the only time roundabouts really break down is in rush-hour traffic. There just isn’t a solution for that other than to not have so many cars on the road at once.
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When I drove in Ireland, I found that operating a stick shift with my left hand was much harder to adjust to than driving on the right.
Peak time traffic lights on the entrance to the roundabout fixes that. Somewhat.
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OK, but the aliens made those crop circles for art, They weren’t meant to be urban planning solutions.
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The magic word being ‘would’.
Nope! I used to have to traverse that roundabout on a regular basis and can confirm that it’s extremely fast, efficient and safe. Until someone dithers, then it gets a bit snarled up. But that’s OK, if you notice that happening you can take another route around the obstruction …
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Yep; more wasteful of space, a bit better for safety and traffic flow IIRC. Hence, little Britain is full of roundabouts and in the States, with land to burn, they use cloverleaves.
I see it as a risk tradeoff. If someone miscalculates in a roundabout, a fender-bender is the likely result. If a person doesn’t heed a stop light, then the resulting collision is likely to be much more severe. I’ll trade 16 minor accidents for 1 fatal one any day.
My problem with roundabouts in states is that that risk tradeoff doesn’t hold for cycles and pedestrians. They’re just as vulnerable in either intersection type AND states folks are used to looking for non-car obstacles crossing at the 90 degree intersections which don’t exist in roundabouts. I wonder how is this handled in places were roundabouts are common.
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