[thechat] No Roundabouts In Japan?

[Judah McAuley]

Garrett Coakley wrote:
> I was in the pub last night with my landlord and we were having a
> rambling conversation about travelling, different cultures, etc, when he
> came out with this little nugget:
> 
>      "You do realise that there are no roundabouts in Japan?"
> 
> Now, I used to be an alt.folklore.urban lurker in my youth, so something
> about the phrase got me thinking. Was it true, or was it another one of
> those memes that gets passed around from pub to pub?
> 
> I'm not a driver, so my knowledge on traffic management and road design
> could probably fit on the back of a matchbook, but we have so many of them
> here the thought of a country without any seems odd.

I can't tell you about Japan, but the western US has almost no 
roundabouts either.  In Salem and Eugene (2nd and 3rd largest towns in 
Oregon) there aren't any.  Portland is a pretty big city, so it might 
have one I don't know about, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have one. 
There is a new one in Bend and it confuses the hell out of visitors. 
They have been proposed by traffic management people here in Eugene 
periodically, but they always get shouted down by people who think they 
are strange and foriegn.  I've never encountered one in Seattle or San 
Francisco and I don't ever go down to LA, but I strongly doubt they have 
any either.  For whatever reason, my part of the US just doesn't do 
roundabouts.  There might be some on the East Coast, but I wouldn't know.

For the record, I found roundabouts to be pretty easy to figure out.  I 
think Americans just like things to be black and white.  You either stop 
or you go.  We just don't understand this "yield" crap.

Judah