signaling in rotaries

[cos]

I want to start a trend.

Several years ago I heard that in some places in Europe, people signal in rotaries - err, "traffic circles", for readers outside of New England. When they're in the rotary going around, they signal pointing into the circle. When they pass the last exit before the one they want to take - IOW, when they plan to take the next exit out of the rotary - they signal out from the circle. That way, people know which cars are trying to go around and which cars are trying to get out where.

As soon as I heard it, I thought it made a lot of sense, and started doing it. I hope that if people see me, some of them might like the idea and start doing the same thing. I've been signaling in rotaries for a few years, and I have no idea if anyone else has been swayed. I don't recall seeing any other cars doing it. But maybe if they saw it happen more often, if more of us did it, it might catch on.

Anyone wanna try?

Comments

[beowabbit]

Better still would be getting the police to enforce the "yield to traffic in rotary" law.

Yeah! I recently had people throw stuff at me out of their car because I did not yield to them when they were entering a rotary and I was in it. I had the right of way, I expected them to pause before entering (which they did, enough not to hit me anyway), but they immediately honked at me and pulled up alongside me when we both got out of the rotary and threw the ice from a soda at my car. Made me wish I were an undercover cop.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

Weird. I just sort of assume that having stuff thrown at me happens because I'm on a bike, and the cagers know I'm unlikely to do real damage to them and their 2-ton penis compensators unless they're slow hitting the gas. I'm not sure if it heartens me or not to hear you've had the same experience in (I assume) a car.

The cops don't care about such things, BTW. Hitting a pedestrian with a cup of ice is assault. Hitting a biker with the same ice is good clean fun, and kids will be kids, and geez, what do I want them to do, anyway, pull the little scamps over? OTOH, catching thrown ice barehanded and throwing it back is a felony, at least according to one cop I've had run-ins with in Belmont.

Not that I'm angry or anything.

[sauergeek.livejournal.com]

From what I've heard, up until about 20 years ago, MA had the opposite rule -- rotary traffic must yield to traffic entering. This probably led to fast and amazingly dense tie-ups, so the law got changed. Whether people actually pay attention to the change is still up for debate.

[cos]

As I recall, the law was simply that rotaries are intersections and follow all the rules for intersections. So the car on the right has right of way. Eventually they realized that was stupid and made an exception for rotaries.