Comment on You can drive 74 hours and still be in Germany. The American mind can't comprehend this.

• lars@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I’ve seen

  • Turning left without going around the center

  • Stopping to allow someone into the roundabout intended as a kind gesture and

  • My mom insisted that in her car I use the left turn signal if my roundabout exit is to the left of my entrance

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  • localhost443@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • lars@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Wait ’til you hear our cute ideas about public wellbeing!! They sell themselves!

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  • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah your mom is right. An entrance signal is useful on smaller roundabouts, but is always less important than the exit right signal

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  • Arkthos@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • lars@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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      • dvlsg@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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• frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• Wolf@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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 them 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.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Wolf@lemmy.today ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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• misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I asked my neighbor, he said Europeans are stupid for driving in circles all day. So, that’s how.

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