Thank you. Roundabouts save lives. If they ever came to the US I've seen estimates that they'd save 10,000 lives a year and 10x that many serious injuries. They LOOK scary if you're not familiar but looks are deceiving.
It's red lights that are death traps. Because of red lights, people don't slow down and look both ways (as they should) when they enter an intersection -- most people actually speed up because they're trying to beat the light.
So with one driver speeding and not looking, all it takes is a second driver coming the other direction to make a left turn into his path -- or a driver at the cross street to miss the light -- and you have all the ingredients for a fatal or nearly fatal accident.
That scenario goes completely away with a roundabout. Driver 1 is forced to slow down and follow the rightward flow. Driver 2 making the left turn never crosses paths with driver 1. Driver 3 merges in either before or after Driver 1.
And for all drivers, the beauty is, they only have to look one direction -- left -- to avoid an accident. There are fewer ways to screw up. And if you do screw up, you don't have a high-speed head-on or t-bone accident, you have a glancing blow between two vehicles traveling the same direction at relatively low speed .So in most cases a fender bender.
I think people hate roundabouts because they force you to drive actively -- you have to slow down, you have to look, you have to steer and judge your merge into other vehices. And you have to trust drivers to some extent. But all those things help safety -- the paradox of traffic safety is what makes motorists uncomfortable usually improves safety by forcing people to slow down and pay attenition.
Whereas traffic lights turn people into bored, passive drivers, disengaged (i.e. on their phones) and driving too fast when they have the green light. When people aren't paying attention, that's when people get killed.
