It’s all about the roundabouts

Before anyone does anything hasty with Fort Collins traffic patterns, may I make a modest proposal?

Let’s pack City Council, the city manager and as many planning staff as will fit into both the city’s Smart Cars, a Cooper Mini and a VW Beetle and run our own version of “The Amazing Race.” The objective will not to win a million bucks –500,000 quid to folks here — just to make it from northeast England across the Welsh border without burning out a clutch or your sanity negotiating one roundabout every mile and a half or so. My not-so-many quid say it can’t be done.

Wednesday’s trip to Wrexham (Wrecsam in Welsh — all signs are proudly bilingual) to see daffodils, lambs, the final resting place of Elihu Yale and the BBC studio where Dr. Who comes from would have been all peaches and cream, including right-hand drive and manual transmission, were it not for the roundabouts.

My sister has experience with both a manual and New Jersey traffic circles if not driving on the “correct” side of the road, but when a couple of dual carriageways (think Harmony and Timberline roads) suddenly each spill all three lanes into a roundabout offering as many as six exiting opportunities, your only option is to look right, invoke your favorite deities and, if you’re lucky, have already figured out which lane you want to be in on the other side. Anything else lands you on the M6 (think Interstate 25 through T-REX) at rush hour with no earthly clue how many miles to the next junction. Guess they didn’t have any quid left over for motorway info signs after they finished the signage required for the roundabouts. As navigator on the little jaunt, I can testify they have plenty of that — the most effective is painting the name of the road directly on the road in front of the driver, if anyone from the city might happen to be taking notes.

Because the infernal devices are everywhere, huge semis jockey for position with transit vans and tiny compacts — at 90 pence per litre of petrol, you don’t want to own a gas-guzzler — on the amazing roundabout race. But, given the universal disdain in which they are held, if there were an alternative route, most truckers and the general public would avoid them whenever they could. In other words, one is like none, and always leads to another.

Gentlemen, start your engines.

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