Traffic lights on roundabouts poll

[Yorkie]

David: you've had more experience of driving on the continent of Europe than I have. In Europe, do they have traffic lights at roundabouts?

Al.

I've only driven in France, Germany, Belgium and Holland Al, and not very extensively. I don't think they have many light controlled roundabouts, but I guess a lot depends on the road layouts and traffic densities. At the locations in the UK where they have them, I think it would be chaos otherwise - Meadowhall at Sheffield for example, or Park Square roundabout at the end of the Parkway.

I don't think direct comparisons can be made.

France is a very different country from the UK. Same population (60 million), but France is 544,000 sq km - the UK is only 242 sq KM. The UK has 77 vehicles per KM of road - the French have 38. The UK has the 7th most used road network in the world - 1,257,000 vehicle/kms a year. France has 565,000 vehicle/KMs per year. 90% of Brits live in urban areas, 77% of French do.

(Source: Economist 'World in Ffigures').

Most of England at any rate, consists of large urban conurbations - London, Birmingham & the West Midlands, then the East Mids - Notts, Derby, Leicester, then South Yorks - Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley, Doncaster, then Greater Manchester, and so on it goes.

In France, outside of Paris, there are a few quite large cities - Lyon, Bordeaux etc, so you get lots of smaller towns (small by UK standards) rather than urban conurbations. Paris is an altogether different thing - at somewhere like the Etoile ('Star) - the large island at the Arc de Triomphe, motorists drive at a speed at which centrifugal force throws them off in the general direction of where they hope to go. When my elder son lived in Paris, it was always an education to be a passenger when our French daughter-in-law was at the wheel. She shot straight through a red light on the Peripherique - the ring road around Paris, and I said 'heck, you've just shot straight through a red light'. Using typically Gallic logic, she said 'Yes, I know I have - it was far too dangerous to stop'.

I find it far less hassle driving in France than in the UK. Drivers seem more patient and less combative - apart from Brits, who, as soon as they drive off the ferry or 'le Shuttle', seem to go a bit loopy. Every Autumn for many years, with my younger son and sometimes my wife, we go on Battlefield Tours and have travelled extensively through Holland, Belgium, France, West and East Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic. (Last Autumn we did an SOE/French resistance tour - this Autumn, we're going to the Normandy Beaches and Caen). Driving standards on the whole seem quite good, and few drivers seem to drive at high speeds, even on German Autobahns, (which aren't quite what they're often cracked up to be).

Laws are different too, from country to country, which has a bearing on how people drive. In Holland for example, if a motorist knocks a child under 16 down, the driver is automatically to blame. If a ball runs into a street and a child runs after it without looking, and a motorist knocks the child over, the driver is deemed to be at fault, because that's what kids do, and motorists should be aware of it. Not an accident - negligence on the part of the driver. Hence, attitudes differ markedly from the UK, where I think most people would hold the child and its parents to blame. Because most road deaths and serious accidents occur in urban areas, it could be argued that far more of our roads should have a 20MPH limit, (which wouldn't actually slow down progress of traffic).

I remain nonplussed as to how drivers can see prominent warning saigns saying 'SPEED CAMERAS' then the cameras loom up in yellow boxes as big as a tea chest, but still they get clocked, then whinge that its all about income generation - not road safety. Getting clocked is not not bad luck, it's bad driving, and a bad attitude to road safety.

Postulated and potificated Yorkie.