[badpun]

> Let's say you have one car per hour, or any number of cars approaching in such a way that none of them gets close to the intersection at the same time.

That's not light traffic, that's basically no traffic. I don't think anyone bothers to build a roundabout for such intersection.

Roundabouts are for light to moderate traffic scenarios. Their main benefit is that they get drivers to slow down, which vastly reduces number of accidents and fatalities on the intersection. The effect on throughput is secondary, as the intersection was not congested anyway.

[pi-e-sigma]

That claim of reduced fatalities is also getting outdated now, since the introduction of roundabouts with more than one line. Also accident rate for the cyclists is actually higher on roundabout than in a a standard intersection. So all in all, roundabouts are not as great as many insist and my beef with them and their supporters is that they keep bringing up the same talking points that were presented _before_ roundabouts started to be built on a massive scale and don't want to hear the empirical evidence about how these roundabouts actually work in practice.