Roundabout anxiety
- FTFO
- Aug 6
- 3 min read
Roundabouts don’t feel safer than intersections but they are
Kristy Dyer - Jul 14, 2026
When I’m driving my car, bicycles make me nervous.
Sometimes they move faster than the traffic. They can switch from the sidewalk to the roadway and back. Bikes aren’t as easy to see and track in my mirrors.
On the other hand, I rather like roundabouts. They engage my love of driving, like having a stick-shift car and the sun-roof open. I am amused by the drivers hesitating at the entrances, and I was disappointed when Penticton put up roundabout speed limits (Don’t tell my “L” driver I said that.)
Roundabouts are fascinating. Penticton has roundabouts, not traffic circles. I know, it’s a circle and it has traffic in it but if you are an urban planning geek there’s a difference.
If you watch National Lampoon's European Vacation ("Hey look kids, there's Big Ben,
and there's Parliament... again.") or if the Arc de Triomphe is in the middle, it’s a traffic circle. Traffic circles generally have multiple lanes, “on ramps” that allow you to enter at full speed and sometimes drivers in the circle are supposed to stop for entering drivers.
Roundabouts are generally a single lane and vehicles have to slow to enter. There is an island in the middle of a roundabout but it’s not decorative. It will have an elegant apron, painted a different colour or made of bricks, raised a few inches higher than the pavement. That is for semi-trucks, which drive over the curb, to get a bigger turning radius.
The plantings serve two purposes. First, if a vehicle sails through the intersection, it is bogged down by the dirt and bushes. You won’t see a mature oak, which could kill the occupants of a vehicle that collides with it, in the middle of a modern roundabout.
Second, mature plantings block the view of vehicles entering from the other side, focusing drivers’ attention on what matters—vehicles coming from the left.
Let me list the ways a vehicle can hit another vehicle on the road:
• It can hit a vehicle coming the other way (a head-on collision).
• It can rear-end the vehicle in front of it.
• It can hit a vehicle that is turning left (t-boning it).
Traffic engineers map 32 vehicle-vehicle collision points in a four-way intersection and 24 vehicle-pedestrian collision points. Roundabouts have only eight vehicle-vehicle collision points and eight vehicle-pedistrian collision points. Not only that but the vehicle-vehicle collision points in a roundabout are for side-swipe accidents, ruling out some of the deadliest types of collisions -- head-on collisions (20-25% of fatal crashes) and t-bone collisions (10% of fatal crashes).
Studies in Canada, the US and Europe show roundabouts replacing four-way intersections result in approximately a 40% reduction in the number of injury accidents and about 60% of fatal accidents.
Roundabouts aren’t perfect. If there is a busy road crossing a quiet one, roundabouts are inefficient. Statistics show that if a second lane (an inside and outside circle) is added, that negates the accident advantage (although the accidents are still less dangerous because they are with low-relative-speed sideswipes). Incorporating a bike lane actually increases bike accidents, so bikes have to merge with vehicle traffic approaching a roundabout.
If roundabouts are so much safer, why are they so unpopular? Driving a vehicle is a complex activity but after mastering it, we drive with something like “muscle memory.”
Checking all three mirrors, adjusting speeds, signalling, responding to stop signs and traffic signals all happen automatically.
Commuters often experience driving amnesia, where they arrive at their parking spot and realize they have no memory of the drive home.
When you approach a roundabout, there’s no red (stop) or green (go) signal to keep you in the flow. Instead you have to snap out of it, look left, and consciously merge. That slight increase in anxiety (or annoyance) is real and it’s a feature, not a bug. Breaking the “flow” reduces the chance you will have an accident. I think it’s also the same cue that triggers my “wind in the hair, driving is fun” feeling.
Back to my personal feelings about sharing the road with bikes.
The reason for my anxiety is not really because bikes are difficult to see, behave in unpredictable ways or are ridden by bad riders (though some are). It’s because I’m acutely aware that a collision between my 1,50-kilogram car and a bike would be a disaster.
Even a “dooring” — a collision between a bike and the open door of my parked car — could really injure the cyclist.
Sometimes the anxiety one feels isn’t a problem, it's a safety signal.
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