A heartfelt "thank you" to all veterans and current members of our armed forces. This post has absolutely nothing to do with military service, but I couldn't let Veterans Day pass without acknowledgement.
It's a small point, but I'll take my victories where I find them.
I have always disliked traffic circles. I encountered my first in Keene, New Hampshire, on a family trip to Canada. I was a new driver, and the circle terrified me, though the experience did come with the comforting realization that if you miss the exit the first time, you can keep trying as many times as you need to. My anxiety did not improve when I encountered them again during our two-year stint living outside of Boston.
Explaining this to others was difficult, especially the part that confused me the most: never knowing who was supposed to have the right of way. Sometimes it was the cars entering the circle, and sometimes those already inside. People would look at me as if I had just announced that sometimes water was sometimes wet and sometimes dry. "The cars in the circle always have the right of way," they told me. I knew they were wrong—but they also knew I was wrong.
That's where things stood until recently, when Claude was proofreading an essay for me, and I asked for the difference between traffic circles and roundabouts, which I had always thought were synonyms.
Claude wrote,
In everyday speech they are synonyms, so you haven’t made an error. Traffic engineers do tell them apart, though.
Traffic circles (New Englanders also call them rotaries) are the older American kind, from the early 1900s onward. They tend to be big and fast. Often the traffic coming in had the right of way, or the circle had stop signs or traffic lights, so drivers had to weave and merge while sizing each other up at speed. That’s the white-knuckle experience you’re describing.
Modern roundabouts were developed in Britain in the 1960s. They’re smaller and built with curved entrances that slow you to about 15–25 mph. The key rule is that traffic coming in yields to traffic already in the circle, so there’s no aggressive merging. They’re designed to be calmer and safer. The first one in the US didn’t appear until 1990, in Nevada.
So what you met in Keene on that family trip was almost certainly a traffic circle, since modern roundabouts didn’t exist in this country yet.
Good to know. Not only that I was right about early traffic circles, but also that the right of way uncertainty is (theoretically) a thing of the past.
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