The thing about us nordics is that we’re actually car-centric, our infrastructure makes driving comfortable and convenient by keeping the people who actively don’t want to drive off the roads, and we actually use logic to design the roads.
For example you’ll note that the vast majority of roads here only have one lane in each direction, with more lanes added only at junctions. Because adding lanes in the middle of a road barely ever helps, the junctions are where you need to do fancy stuff because they’re the bottleneck in the system. Hence why we also really really like roundabouts.
The US isn’t car-centric, it’s just outright incorrectly designed and if anything makes driving as miserable as it can possibly be, for most people. Sitting trapped in your car in bumper-to-bumper traffic is barely a thing up here.
I think the US ranks #6 or 7 in total number of roundabouts. Per capita and per km of road is a different story, but total roundabouts is over 11K in the US, we just have ~6.8 Million kilometers of roads. That’s more than China, and just a smidge less than India.
Absolutely! See if you can get an IKEA to move into your city. They generally build out the areas they’re built in and they use roundabouts everywhere they can.
As an American who has visited Norway a few times, I’m always impressed with their infrastructure.
Yes, I admit, I did drive.
Anyways, I loved the roundabouts inside the tunnels. The U.S. won’t even get their shit together to put in roundabouts on regular roads.
The thing about us nordics is that we’re actually car-centric, our infrastructure makes driving comfortable and convenient by keeping the people who actively don’t want to drive off the roads, and we actually use logic to design the roads.
For example you’ll note that the vast majority of roads here only have one lane in each direction, with more lanes added only at junctions. Because adding lanes in the middle of a road barely ever helps, the junctions are where you need to do fancy stuff because they’re the bottleneck in the system. Hence why we also really really like roundabouts.
The US isn’t car-centric, it’s just outright incorrectly designed and if anything makes driving as miserable as it can possibly be, for most people. Sitting trapped in your car in bumper-to-bumper traffic is barely a thing up here.
The roads I travel daily follow the old cow paths from the farms into Boston’s markets.
I think the US ranks #6 or 7 in total number of roundabouts. Per capita and per km of road is a different story, but total roundabouts is over 11K in the US, we just have ~6.8 Million kilometers of roads. That’s more than China, and just a smidge less than India.
Could still use more. I was very disappointed that my home town put up new lights recently.
We have a big center of town rotary and a few small ones. So, it’s not like it would’ve been an odd choice.
I even wrote a letter to the editor in our small paper. Oh well. 🫤
Absolutely! See if you can get an IKEA to move into your city. They generally build out the areas they’re built in and they use roundabouts everywhere they can.
There’s already an IKEA a couple towns over.