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Welcome to the UK! Home of the queue and the roundabout. Crossroads would be nightmares without road-markings and traffic lights, but roundabouts would be fine.

fotherington

...is in Swindon, UK. Bizarrely, it seems to work, although it's a little bit intimidating the first time you approach it.

The ultimate test for a self-driving car? The Magic Roundabout!

I live in the poxy town of Swindon in England - home of the wierdest traffic management systems in the world, one of which is the Magic Roundabout (which I actually like, but timid drivers wet themselves at the thought of crossing it). On the north side of town, where I live, the new part of the ring road has about a dozen consectutive traffic lights on a road designed for fairly high volumes of traffic - all of which have sensors implanted in the road to detect traffic. The situation you get in rush hour is that when someone wants to get out of a side road, they trip their sensors, which eventually gets their lights green and the main junction is red. A chunk of traffic builds up at the red light and a gap appears in the road ahead. The next lights down then notice the gap and begin to think that it's a good time to let the people out who are waiting, with a consequence that by the time you get there these ones are red too. This repeats all the way up the road, so if you hit one red light, you hit them all.

You could be philosphical and think, "why do I need to hurry?". The answer is that I don't need to hurry, but the constant stop/start does reduce the mileage I get from a tank of petrol, and it just irritates me for various other unquantifiable reasons.

I live in the poxy town of Swindon in England - home of the wierdest traffic management systems in the world, one of which is the Magic Roundabout (which I actually like, but timid drivers wet themselves at the thought of crossing it). On the north side of town, where I live, the new part of the ring road has about a dozen consectutive traffic lights on a road designed for fairly high volumes of traffic - all of which have sensors implanted in the road to detect traffic. The situation you get in rush hour is that when someone wants to get out of a side road, they trip their sensors, which eventually gets their lights green and the main junction is red. A chunk of traffic builds up at the red light and a gap appears in the road ahead. The next lights down then notice the gap and begin to think that it's a good time to let the people out who are waiting, with a consequence that by the time you get there these ones are red too. This repeats all the way up the road, so if you hit one red light, you hit them all.

You could be philosphical and think, "why do I need to hurry?". The answer is that I don't need to hurry, but the constant stop/start does reduce the mileage I get from a tank of petrol, and it just irritates me for various other unquantifiable reasons.

Billie Piper will be the first to get exterminated ;-)

It doesn't fall down if you have one of these

>Wow, this Swindon place must be pretty bad.

It's not great..

But we do have the Magic Roundabout

For those like me who are geographically challenged, Bath is in the United Kingdom, a couple of hours west of London.

Ah, but the museum is at the Swindon campus of the University of Bath. Swindon is between Bath and London, about 1.5 hours west of the capital. The glorious Eddie Izzard once described Swindon as being like Fresno without the charm. Which is about right.

But not, as far as I know, as a musical. It was a straight play