Roundabout Education: Going Nowhere in Circles

Mi Ae Lipe

Founder
Driving in the Real World

Mi Ae Lipe is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and graphic designer who lives another life as a citizen traffic safety advocate. In 2011, she founded a blog called Driving in the Real World and is the author of a very popular monthly column on traffic safety and ADAS technology for Roundel, the national magazine of the BMW Car Club of America.

Along with fellow citizen advocate Mark Butcher, she has worked extensively with Washington State government agencies to strengthen their driver training, testing, instructor curricula, and licensing standards. In 2016, she and Mark organized and led a fact-finding trip to the UK by Washington State government officials and driving school owners to explore that country’s traffic safety ecosystem, long considered one of the best in the world. In 2017, she and Mark were publicly recognized by NHTSA at Lifesavers Conference for this work.

She is currently part of a government group that shapes strategy and policy around autonomous vehicle testing and implementation in Washington State, and she writes and consults about road safety for organizations both in America and internationally.

Roundabouts. The very word provokes stress, confusion, and anxiety for many American drivers, and many of us witness that firsthand in the course of our work. But what causes this negativity? What can we do about it? And why is navigating round things in the street such a psychological struggle for Americans? Not only that, could the different driving rules posed by the mix of traffic calming circles and roundabouts in some cities might be adding to drivers’ confusion?

We all know that educating and coaching drivers how to correctly and safely use roundabouts, but too often it’s an afterthought, and the public is left to “figure it out.” It’s time we change that—and think about how we do it in ways that are actually useful, memorable, and supportive to our target audiences. What’s compelling to engineers and city planners is often not what the public cares about; information is not the same as education.

The end result is frequent frustration, compromised safety, and a perpetuation of negative associations among the very users we’re trying to help. This presentation will cover how we can improve roundabout education by meeting drivers where they’re at instead of the other way around (pun intended).

— Attendees will see excerpts from an actual Nextdoor message thread about two roundabouts in Washington State that illustrate the public relations problems roundabouts have with the American public.

— Attendees will better understand why Americans are so resistant to roundabouts beyond the lack of historical experience.

— Attendees will learn how we can help the public with better education—and what that better education might look like.

— Attendees will see how a real-world mix of roundabouts and traffic circles in the same city can confuse drivers and compound negative feelings about round things in the road.

— The target audience is anyone who is involved in roundabout planning, outreach, and education.

One look at online neighborhood forums like Nextdoor or casual conversation shows the public’s frustration with not knowing what to do at roundabouts, their irritation at how others drive them, and their widespread confusion (and erroneous assumptions) over proper procedures.

All this confirms and perpetuates negative perceptions toward roundabouts, which in turn makes it harder to garner public support for building more of them and achieving the desired safety outcomes. Drivers who are new to roundabouts often cause near-misses or at the very least, social friction because they don't understand how to actually drive them.

We need to make roundabouts less intimidating, more friendly, and safer for all drivers with easy-to-understand, engaging media content that meets them where they're at, not the other way around.