If you’ve ever driven in Europe, you’ve likely mastered how to navigate a roundabout. It’s easy once you get the hang of it—too easy, if you ask England. The town of Swindon is home to a monster of an intersection named “The Magic Roundabout,” which consists of six individual roundabouts, five small ones swirling around a big central gyre.
Built in 1972, the Magic Roundabout is located at the intersection of County Road, Queen’s Drive, Fleming Way, Drove Road, and Shrivenham Road. Some of these roads are fairly large; Queen’s Drive has three lanes of traffic in both directions, while Shrivenham Road looks tiny. We’re not talking about a picturesque part of rural England with more sheep than people, either: There’s a fire station, a soccer stadium, a shopping center, a school, and several residential neighborhoods in the vicinity of the Magic Roundabout. Many motorists drive through it every day.
The center of the intersection is a rather drab-looking standard roundabout with a big light pole in the middle. So far, so good, but here’s where it gets complicated: It’s surrounded by five mini-roundabouts, one for each road that feeds into the intersection. What the hell? Why not just keep the big roundabout and call it a day? It’s a question of making traffic as fluid as possible, and it sounds like a great deal of research went into it.
Frank Blackmore of the British Transport and Road Research Laboratory gets credit (or blame) for the Magic Roundabout. Tests performed in the 1970s revealed that smaller roundabouts improved traffic flow by 25% to 35% compared to bigger roundabouts. Blackmore then experimented with two-roundabout intersections before linking three, four, and ultimately five roundabouts together. On paper, it makes sense: Drivers going from, say, Fleming Way to Queen’s Drive spend less time in the intersection because their path is more direct than if they went all the way around.
In application, well… it’s apparently not as bad as it looks if you treat each mini-roundabout like a normal roundabout. Follow the lane markings, yield to oncoming traffic, and you can drive through this carousel-like intersection without denting a bonnet or a wing. (Hey, it’s England, after all). It’s got to have some merit to it, having been unchanged for more than 50 years.
Some drivers even argue that the Magic Roundabout is better than a conventional roundabout because it allows more cars through the intersection, but not everyone agrees. Even the Brits can’t come to a consensus. In 2007, British car magazine Auto Express named the Magic Roundabout one of the worst intersections in the world. Later that year, it was voted the seventh-scariest intersection in Britain by BBC readers. If you’re wondering what could possibly be worse, look no further than the Hanger Lane Gyratory in West London.
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