Roundabouts really a straight-foward matter

Took my first drive through the new Lorne Street roundabout Monday.

A big Cirque du Soleil semi was in front of me on Third Avenue, pruning a few tree branches with the top of his rig as he approached Lorne, where he paused for a few seconds before heading in.

Either the driver was not familiar with the concept of roundabouts, or he didn’t like the angles. Whichever it was, he decided the best way of dealing with it was to take the shortest route possible.

So he bounced over the curb, across the brick centre circle and carried on across the asphalt and over the small median at the entrance to the Interior Savings Centre parking lot on the other side.

I consider this to be the true grand initiation of our new roundabout, as I’m certain a large number of Kamloops drivers would like to do the same thing. As for me, I decided to use it to pull a U-turn and come in for another approach just to see how others were handling it.

This time, the driver ahead of me was in an SUV, and came to a full stop, looking left for oncoming traffic. Reassured nobody was heading her way, she tentatively pulled into the roundabout and exited again, hopefully in the direction she’d intended.

There have been a few stories about people driving around in the wrong direction, but this is possibly the easiest roundabout on the planet to negotiate — one lane, simple to figure out. Nothing to see here.

In some parts of the world, roundabouts are many lanes wide and faster than a speeding bullet. The largest of all is said to be the one at the Arc De Triomphe in Paris, where a dozen streets intersect. There are eight lanes, and no lane markings.

Some people have been stuck in that roundabout for years, going around and around like Charlie on the MTA.

Almost as grand is the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, seen on TV countless times during the just-concluded London Olympic Games.

Moscow has a serious roundabout, too — six lanes and a quarter of a mile in diameter.

The most dangerous roundabout is said to be in Germany where metal pikes and poles are amassed in the centre daring any errant motorist to try cutting corners.

If roundabouts are tricky for drivers, try being a pedestrian crossing a road anywhere near one. Drivers blasting through no-stop-sign roundabouts aren’t at all interested in stopping for pedestrians — much the same as Kamloops drivers are philosophically opposed to stopping at red lights.

Let’s face it, the roundabout is here to stay (France has more than 30,000 of them; people write entire books about them; at home we have a roundabout calendar, a treasured gift from rellies in England). More and more, it will become a part of driving in Kamloops as engineers struggle to keep traffic moving on ever-more congested roadways.

The roundabout is nothing less than an admission that we can find no better way of travelling from one place to another than getting into a gasoline-sucking vehicle and belching carbon into our atmosphere.

If you haven’t tried the Lorne Street roundabout yet, take a drive from the suburbs and give it a go — it’s worth the $1.23 a litre. I’ll bet you can still see the tire tracks from the Cirque truck.

PS: After writing this, I got a call from a fellow who got caught in a traffic jam caused by a couple of Cirque trucks using the Red Bridge. There’s a law against that, and we followed up with a story in The Daily News. No further word from Cirque so far.