[ajb]

I'm sure you know this, but for the benefit of those who haven't seen it before: it does not go anticlockwise. The"roundabout" in the middle is an illusion generated by the 5 normal roundabouts in a circle. There are no special rules.

It has a bad rep, but if you're used to British mini roundabouts, driving on it is a non-event. The regularity actually means it's simpler than other, smaller, but more arbitrary aggregations of mini-roundabouts.

[cucumber3732842]

So it accomplishes the baseline performance that just about every major intersection planned out in the last 100yr does of being navigable without serious confusion.

If it's so good why aren't there more of them? Not like England has any shortage of N-way (where N >4) intersections they could be used at.

The wikipedia page says "the roundabout provides a better throughput of traffic than other designs and has an excellent safety record, since traffic moves too slowly to do serious damage in the event of a collision" which to me sounds a lot like someone trying to spin failure to play up the silver lining.

[ajb]

I don't know why you expect me to be a partisan for it, given the best thing I said about it was "driving on it is a non-event".

Experimentation with junction design has been a good thing in the UK. Many of the designs are, however, attempts to do as well as possible in the space, because a better design would require compulsorily purchasing some people's houses or gardens. So, although there are not lots of magic roundabouts, there are lots of agglomerations of mini-roundabouts with slightly different topology , many of which are more annoying (but fit in the space, and keep traffic flowing).

However, it does seem likely that this is kept mainly because of its fame. I seem to recall that there was a proposal to replace it which was shouted down.

[cjs_ac]

It was designed by the Road Research Laboratory and has been measured to have better traffic throughput than the conventional roundabout it replaced.