• CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social
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    4 days ago

    We’ve had roundabouts all over the place for 20+ years at this point. I genuinely don’t get why people still struggle so much with them.

    But fwiw my town also requires several roundabouts to get through and it’s not very big. And almost every time an intersection needs work, we get a new roundabout.

    However I actually do like the way the directions work in maps where it says “take the x exit” because a ton of roads aren’t well marked in roundabouts, and there are some weird but decently common situations where the exit you’d think you need is not the right one. Thats just sort of what happens when you are retrofitting everything, and have space constraints.

    • lime!@feddit.nu
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      4 days ago

      but i mean, it doesn’t say “continue straight” in every interchange. i don’t know how other countries do it but we have being able to navigate by signage as a mandatory part of driving tests and it’s always understood that no instructions given means “continue on your current course”.

      • Dozzi92@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Sometimes my GPS will be like “go left up here,” but left is actually straight and right is the exit. I think it’s just seeing if I’m still awake.

      • CentipedeFarrier@piefed.social
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        4 days ago

        It depends here, sometimes we genuinely do get a bunch of “continue straight to stay on xyz” for no obvious reason, and on highways with multiple off-ramps that split the existing lanes, it’s very common to get “use the middle lane to continue on xyz” so it’s not really as out of place as you might think. Our roads are just spaghetti garbage. Josh from Let’s Game It Out must have done the road planning.

        And yes, navigating by signs is doable, but we are (were?) talking about navigation apps which provide excruciating detail, so thats a bit of a moot point. But where, specifically, they are marked changes, how well they are marked changes, and on many of them you can’t see signage at night until you are almost past it, and due to mostly being space-constrained retrofits, which exit you want from the roundabout isn’t nearly as standardized as it should be, even to continue straight. Sometimes straight is the first exit, sometimes the third. Usually second. It’s not a super great implementation of the system, but the roads themselves aren’t a whole lot better. Sometimes it is really really unclear what road you are already on, because only cross-streets are marked (as in you can’t see the signs for your road until you go through an intersection, and it might not be marked in a way you can see for several blocks if the intersections are with small quiet streets)… driving in general sucks, basically, and the maps direction to continue through the second exit is thus either welcome, or at least not a dealbreaker, for drivers here.