🚀 go-pugleaf

John_David_Galt@acm.org wrote:
> 
> 
> Okay, I'll bite.  I stop at the stop sign on entering the rotary, wait
> for an opening, then go.  The stop, and the sharp curve, are responsible
> for most of the time wasted (that and the fact that rotaries are usually
> only one lane wide, because if they weren't you'd need to put all-way
> stops at each entrance to them or chaos would result).
> 
> Please tell me what I'm doing wrong, and how to get through faster by
> "using them correctly".
> 

You stop? That just makes things harder.... 

Admittedly, the speed at which one enters the rotary depends very much
on the shaping of the road, however.... with these points in mind:

A quick guide to rotaries:

1. Entering a rotary is very much like merging into freeway traffic: if
you're going at a similar speed as the traffic on the rotary, it's
easier and you need less of a gap.

2. In order to do this properly, you need to make a stop/go decision
about 2-4 seconds before getting to the give way line. - If you're on
the give way line, stationary, you've made life harder for yourself...
it's difficult to accelerate into the gaps in traffic from a halt.

3. Your decision time is influenced by the visibility, shape of the
rotary, and your speed. Ideally, you should be able to make a to go
decision about 1 to 2 seconds before you are forced to halt.

4. Judging entries to rotaries at any real speed takes practice, and I
personally found that it took me several months longer than everything
else: I would always come to a halt early on since I just wasn't sure.

5. If you want to be cautious... approach the rotary slower to give
yourself more thinking time, but if possible *always* try to keep the
car rolling ... 5 or 6 mph can make all the difference.

6. For comparison, let's consider a rotary that's about 80 yards
across... that's fairly large, and the kind of thing you'd have
straddling a freeway junction with either 2 or 3 lanes on the rotary.
You can normally enter them at between 15 and 25mph, and on the rotary,
I'd normally be doing about 30-35. There's a lovely rotary on my way to
work, where you can enter at about 15, and then build up speed all the
way round, exiting onto a freeway entry ramp at about 40mph.

7. For rotaries in built up areas the speeds are obviously lower. Same
rules apply: if you can keep the car rolling on entry it's a piece of
cake!

MH.

--
Martin Harvey.
New email address!!!!!!!!
martin@pergolesi.demon.co.uk
http://www.pergolesi.demon.co.uk