American here, I have no problem with them. There was a roundabout nearby in my city. When they unleashed it, the first driver brave enough to traverse it swerved off the road and died on the spot. It caused such a scene that the next 3 cars watching entered the wrong way and started to pile up. More cars piled up over the coming weeks, it couldn’t be taped off because the city service workers were unfortunately not Europeans and also could not traverse the labyrinth, they too piled up and died of starvation. Eventually it collapsed into a singularity under its growing weight (Americans are fat, so it was over the Chandrasekhar limit), cars add into the eternal swirl each day and emanate slowly as Hawking radiation. It’s quite beautiful to see.
for a country who’s core values is Car, they suck at driving
Our core value is taking necessary services and pricing them like a luxury.
Spread everything out really far, get rid of public transit, and, since everybody still needs a license to drive your expensive cars, make the driving test super easy to pass so almost everybody can drive. Boom, 1.2 passengers per car and nobody can actually drive them well.
Yep. This person gets it. The auto and gasoline industry basically ruined the environment and our culture so a few select people can make a few $$$.
My driving test consisted of making four right turns, then parking and verbalising how i would park on a hill.
No parallel parking, no back-in parking or even 3 point turn. I was never even taught to parallel park, but i saw the episode where kris kardashian taught one of her kids and it just clicked lucky for me lolol
Dont judge, the early seaons are great for cringe watching :p
I reeeeal American I just don’t want my tax dollars going to fund other people’s firefighting costs. Can we privatize that??
Also a right to bear arms and own weapons is sacrosanct and very important to my people. Why can’t our people please finally be allowed to have nuclear weapons. Their kids need some too. Very important.
Idiots.
Our core value isn’t Car, it’s “individual freedom, especially at the cost or inconvenience of others”. It just so happens that Car aligns pretty well with that
So interesting to me that Americans think being dependent on a car is “freedom”. Individual freedom should be the freedom to get to where you need to go with viable options to walk, bike, train, bus, tram, or drive.
I think you’re focusing too much on the “individual freedom” bit and missing the “at the cost or inconvenience of others” bit
We rarely have other viable options. Long before most of us were born, the U.S. built an infrastructure centered around cars, sidelining other forms of transportation.
In America, owning a car is often the key to freedom of movement. So it’s no surprise people equate cars with freedom. Getting people to see how car dependency actually limits our freedom is like trying to wake someone from the Matrix.
No one can make a profit on people walking, so I dont understand how your point makes any sense.
edit: oh wait! footware and sports drink companies. OK, well, you’ve made some compelling points here. And we use small handed children to in America to make these shoes and sports drinks, right?
To be fair the mindset that a car means freedom is also quite common in Germany too. Especially in the countryside (tbf its often required if you dont want waste a lot of time due to shitty public transportation)
Yeah, you can’t drive like a dangerous asshole on your way to park your full size truck based SUV across two handicap spots if you don’t have a car in the first place!
you don’t have to be smart to drive, we made sure of that.
Hey, I represent that implication!
Muh freedum to die in a raging, alcohol sparked ball of fire, metal, bone, and blood.
Just like the founding fathers intended
A bunch of white landlords in their 20s‑ish who owned other human beings def understand me better than anyone else
I’ve taken a trip to see this infamous roundabout - it’s quite pretty at night!
Interestingly they spin counterclockwise here, but clockwise in Australia.
How can one be too stupid to use a roundabout?
I don’t think it’s a matter of ‘can’t figure it out’ as much as ‘don’t like change’. We’ve been putting roundabouts in my shithole state and the number of people who complain about them boggles the mind. They will successfully navigate them, but they’ll whinge about it the whole time.
This happened to me just the other day as I was chauffeuring some good old boy around. Mind you he wasn’t even driving, but still had to let it be known that he disapproved. There was no traffic so I barely had to slow down to navigate the intersection and his input was “I hate these things, they just slow you down!”. I tried pointing out that if it had been a 4-way stop we would have had to stop, so it was actually faster this way. I don’t know if he was immune to logic or just unwilling to admit that something that was different than what he was used to had a benefit, but he just repeated that he hated them, so I dropped the subject.
I don’t know if he was immune to logic or just unwilling to admit that something that was different than what he was used to had a benefit
You said they were a (presumably white) old American dude, so I would wager that it’s all of the above.
Yeah, he was a cracker. Here’s the thing though, in other ways he seems like a perfectly normal and decent human being.
We passed by an Amish produce stand and he had me stop. He got a bunch of fresh Veggies and then we stopped at a Chinese restaurant where he went inside and gave the lady working there a bunch of them. As we were leaving he even had a short conversation with her in Chinese. I’m sure it was very simple things like “Have a good one” and “Goodbye” or something similar, but I thought it was cool he had learned it. That kind of thing is pretty rare around here.
In the car he was telling me how they had recently lost one of their children in a car accident. It was heartbreaking. Sounds like he has known them for quite while.
He then had me drive to a neighboring college town that has people from all over the world come to go to school, so it’s a fairly diverse place. He was telling me he liked it there because there were so many different kinds of interesting people. We stopped by his Dry Cleaners which was also ran by Chinese people and he left them with the other half of the vegetables.
Then on the way out of town he had me stop at the International Market. He asked me if I had ever tried Eel before and when I said I hadn’t he bought me a couple of cans (it’s ok, nothing to write home about imo).
So yeah, he was an old white redneck, but he wasn’t a total piece of shit and fairly open minded about some things. I’m not sure why he hates roundabouts, but that attitude is super common around here, among all sorts of people.
I’ve seen
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Turning left without going around the center
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Stopping to allow someone into the roundabout intended as a kind gesture and
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My mom insisted that in her car I use the left turn signal if my roundabout exit is to the left of my entrance
I think using your left signal if you’re leaving on the third exit of a four exit roundabout is actually standard practice in some countries. I saw people do this a lot in Norway for instance.
Oh? This is actually great news.
I’m a grownup who got a driving license late, but even after the practice and test I didn’t know the answer to how to signal out of a roundabout. So I looked it up.
In my home state, the law is: never use your left signal at a roundabout (unless switching to a left lane within a roundabout). So I assumed it was universal. Maybe not.
That’s probably how it should be. Otherwise the only way the left signal is useful is if you see it right when the car enters. Otherwise you’ll have no idea what exit it’s meant to be for.
Yeah your mom is right. An entrance signal is useful on smaller roundabouts, but is always less important than the exit right signal
As a European it’s very cute listening to you guys working out how to signal on a roundabout.
But to give some help… Signal as if you’re going to continue round until you pass the exit before the one you need at which point signal for the exit.
Wait ’til you hear our cute ideas about public wellbeing!! They sell themselves!
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Unfortunately, it’s a thing. I’ve had people try to merge onto the roundabout when I’m in it, and then honk at me when I didn’t let them through. If any of these people ever do hit my car, I am not going to try to correct them ahead of time so that they perjurer themselves to the cop who eventually shows up to take the report.
Which I think speaks to the terrible level of driver training in America. A roundabout is a combination of things that you should already know about as a driver, like how yield signs work, and how to stay in your lane and follow lines on the road. If you can’t put those thoughts together, then I question your ability to drive safely at all.
I asked my neighbor, he said Europeans are stupid for driving in circles all day. So, that’s how.
This was brilliant.
I’ve never seen this copypasta and I love it.
I typed it up while driving through a roundabout. It came from the hea
They’ve started using traffic circles in my state. They work sooo much better than traffic lights at intersections.
Roundabouts are even better.
I didn’t realize there was a difference
Traffic circles are not real roundabouts. They are just a road that have a circle shape. For example traffic circles often have traffic lights.
Roundabouts are traffic circles. But they have to be just a circle with “give way” at the entrance. No stop signs, no traffic lights.
I love roundabouts, but goddamn are they annoying when you’re stuck in a route starvation situation. I’ve had bad days when I’m stuck for close to 5 minutes at one near my house depending on time of day and approach route.
Sounds like you need a 2-laner and drivers who understand how they work
It’s already a 2/2.5 lane roundabout, but if you’re on entrance 3, while 1 and 2 are busy as hell, you may not have a window to safely go through.
This roundabout is at a major intersection just off of a freeway and between like 3 different shopping centers, so it’s awful to go through at rush hour. I’ve gotten good at eyeballing windows that scare the piss out of my wife in that roundabout.
There’s quite a few roundabouts near us that have traffic lights that only function during busy traffic. Usually only installed on the busy sides.
I mean sure, but I’ve been stuck at lights that long too
At least at a long red I can run it safely if there’s no one around (I had to do that at my last apartment complex because the secondary road had stupid long lights overnight, and mine regularly skipped my direction).
As an American, I can ride my mobility scooter for 74 hours and still be in Walmart. Comprend that.
Do they have pit stops to recharge the batteries at Walmart? I would imagine there is also a burrito stand nearby
They’re not called burritos any more. They’re called Americas.
If you imply different you’ll get deported.
I give it 3 months until it’s renamed the Gulf of Burrito
Mr bean, is that you?
do germans move their cars like the flintstones or how do they manage to have fuel/battery for 74hrs?
Two words: German Efficiency
it’s a flintstones thing then
I hear their gas devices are very efficient.
Gassing out your soldiers during the first deployment of chemical weapons because you forgot about the wind is less than impressive.
Since you’re in a roundabout, you just need a large funnel into the gas tank. Every time around, someone standing at the side pours a bit of fuel in while you pass, so you get a splash of fuel per lap!
Their cars run off centrifugal force.
Just add a long range tank in the trunk.
A normal car can do 1600 km or 1000 miles on a tank. By normal of course I mean diesel-powered German executive class sedan or wagon with an 80 liter tank.
At the low speeds of the roundabout, you might use more fuel, so maybe it’ll only do 1200 km on a tank. Just use a long range tank and you’re golden. They use them in endurance racing, or to go illegally fast for extended periods of time in Cannonball Runs.
Easy, just pick a roundabout that goes downhill.
There’s a few diesel cars that can reach that distance on one tank (though it requires hypermiling)
I did not know
hypermiling
means making post-purchase changes to your car to make it more efficient. Why wouldn’t manufacturers sell them in better quality to begin with?
Not necessarily, it can mean disabling aircon, driving the lower speed limit, taking a flatter route, etc
It’s not always about quality or performance, you want cars to be comfortable too, which is why you have to make tradeoffs. One thing hypermilers sometimes do is taping the seams on the hood, door, etc to improve aerodynamics. You could make a car from factory without seams in the body, but you won’t sell very many unless you can convince people to crawl in through a window.
Other things may be prohibitively expensive, or not durable, so you make tradeoffs. As efficient as possible while staying within the chosen price class and providing a certain standard of comfort.
Remarkably interesting and human details—thank you for taking the time.
You can fit 74 Germanys inside a Texas roundabout. The European mind cannot comprehend this.
You can fit 74 texases inside an Australian cattle station. They’re hilariously angry about it.
That says more about the fat-ass Texans than the Germans
I think those are called beltways
Laughs in Australian
America’s been adopting roundabouts in the last decade.
Yeah, I have a few in my Pennsyltucky town and over the years people have even learned not to stop at the yield signs!
Yielding is a woke liberal socialist concept
The American mind cannot comprehend nuance. It is all either stop or go. And now yield in Pennky.
Finally! People complain about them, but those people don’t understand how beneficial they are overall.
They put one on a rural overpass where farmers have to cross all the time where I live. Everyone I know who lives there or farms there hates it.
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If you overshoot your destination, do you have to drive another 74 hours to get back to it?
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If you turn around (going against the circle), does it go up in time?
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Why did it stop at 74? Why not infinity or 99? I can plot 79 hours from Key West Florida to Anchorage Alaska
What a neat bug.
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Uh, you know we have roundabouts in the US too, right?
Round about one roundabout
This is a reference to a series of old memes that popped up as a reaction to each other
https://lemmy.world/post/14474175
https://lemmy.world/post/14726913
https://lemmy.world/post/14707889there were a lot more
You don’t need a roundabout to drive around a block forever.
Don’t even have any nice landmarks on the drive, like Big Ben.
Parliament.
big ben, parliament!
I navigate by Walmarts
There’s a million things Americans can’t comprehend. Not licking billionaire’s boots, for one
Schaut mal, Kinder, Big Ben
Unexpected European Vacation quote.
In Taiwan, we do roundabouts all wrong. We add traffic lights in the middle of them.
ಠ_ಠ
Hey look kids! It’s Big Ben!
Parliament!
Bravo !
