Jack Knox
Slightly Skewed
She looked to the heavens, then back to the ground. "Aliens?"
She tried to make it sound like a joke, but didn't quite succeed. How else to explain the perfect circle, the size of a small city lot, that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the ground?
Inching to the edge, she drew a deep breath, then stepped in -and was hit by a bus.
Right, a traffic circle.
It appears we still don't know what to make of roadway roundabouts.
They began popping up a few years ago, as unexpected and unwelcome to some as zits on your wedding day.
This was particularly disconcerting where I live, in Victoria (our motto: "We fear change"), where the capital's bureaucratic mindset is not well-known for embracing new ideas. Reaction among local motorists was predictable: Many braked to a halt, got out and stared. A few drove straight ahead, bumpety-bump over the central island, because that is what they had always done. Others simply abandoned their vehicles, walked home and curled up in a ball.
Opinion was split over how the traffic circles came to be: Some blamed Trudeau, the French and metric, while the rest detected the unseen hand of George W. Bush, the New World Order and Haliburton.
Note that this was just the reaction to the small, single-lane, slow-speed traffic circles that we have in B.C. Imagine what would happen if we got the big, multi-lane, pedal-to-the-metal roundabouts like they have in Europe, the ones that whip you round and round and round like the spin cycle on a washing machine until randomly spitting you out onto a street you have never seen before. (This is also how your socks get lost.)
My parents got caught in one of those when visiting England in 1978. I never saw them again.
Why the sudden proliferation of roundabouts?
(Purists will tell you the terms "traffic circle" and "roundabout" are not interchangeable, but these are the same pedants who insist there is a difference between listening to Glenn Beck and jamming a meat thermometer in your ear.) In part, traffic circles have spread because ICBC has, for the past several years, been subsidizing municipalities that install them in place of conventional crossroads.
Traffic circles keep cars moving more smoothly than do traditional intersections and are much safer to boot, the argument goes. Statistics show collisions fell dramatically after roundabouts replaced many conventional crossings.
Nonetheless, many uncertain drivers still approach them as gingerly as Mel Gibson tiptoeing into a synagogue.
Here's the simple rule: Yield the right of way to pedestrians and any vehicle already in the circle, but otherwise do not stop before entering.
Just slide into a gap in traffic. This means giving way to the cars in the circle to your left, which befuddles those who grew up believing that traffic on the right always has the right of way.
Remember that circles always flow counterclockwise, just like NASCAR, except you don't have to scramble through the driver's side window to punch someone after he crashes into you.
Also note that a roundabout does not work like a four-way stop, with traffic taking turns entering.
"This crazy Canadian politeness of alternate yielding defeats the purpose of the traffic circle," a letter to the editor scolded last year. "It is socialism at its worst; better that all should crawl than that some should occasionally win the draw and be unimpeded."
And better get used to them, because roundabouts keep appearing as though by magic, just like Harry Potter or the HST.
Come on, British Columbia. We learned how to program our PVRs, put quarters in shopping carts and adapt to Sunday shopping.
Surely we can drive in circles.
