This could get ugly

According to a report in The Economist, Ontario is starting to introduce roundabouts:

One afternoon last month roadworkers removed the covers from Yield signs at a newly built roundabout in Cambridge, in south-western Ontario, watching anxiously to see what would happen. Traffic lights, the traditional method of controlling intersections in Canada, had been ripped out. Drivers faced an unfamiliar circle. Would they know what to do?

The question would seem absurd to Britons, who invented the modern roundabout in the 1960s. But in Canada until very recently, they were rare (as they were, apart from the odd circle in New York and Washington, DC, in the United States until the 1990s).

While roundabouts work remarkably well in Britain, they're not the be-all and end-all of traffic control. One of my few visits to the south of England found me in a horrific piece of roadwork the locals called the "magic roundabout". It was a gigantic ring, composed of interlocking mini-roundabouts. Clearly I wasn't the only unfortunate visitor, because just as we entered one of the mini-circles, there was a crash from one of the adjacent circles (fortunately for me, it was "upstream", not in the direction I needed to travel). I needed a stiff drink and a change of underwear after negotiating my way 3/4 around the damned roundabout. My local guide nearly wet himself laughing . . .

Similarly, the few roundabouts I've encountered in the Boston area appear to be the automotive equivalents of free-fire zones: vehicles entering at speed, forcing the vehicles already in the circle to yield. Lots of fun.