Closing Remarks

Advice on Roundabouts
Those of you who were here when I closed the meeting with advice on recycling may remember that
I moved to Bridge of Allan to escape the chaos of bin choice on Glen Road, Dunblane. I have now
been living on the edge of BoA for over one month and some advice on roundabouts seems
essential.
Roundabouts are very British. You can hardly find one in the USA; indeed I had to drive some
American friends around St Lucia once because they could not cope with roundabouts (and driving
on the left). The piece de resistance of Roundabouts is surely the Swindon 7 circle, nicknamed the
magic roundabout. Anyone who can manoeuvre into this network and leave where they intended
has passed the advanced roundabout test with a gold star.
Roundabouts, when motorists follow the etiquette are very efficient at keeping the traffic moving.
When Derby City Council put lights on a busy roundabout to control movement, the ring road and
the shopping slip road were jammed for hours and the lights had to be removed.
Basically when approaching a roundabout, the driver slows down ready to give way, checks the
traffic, gives way to traffic already on the roundabout to their right then smoothly joins the
roundabout traffic when there is a gap. Fairly simple.
However I have now been a frequent user of the Bridge of Allan mini roundabouts and this warning
advice is necessary. There is an unpublished convention in Bridge of Allan, not known or understood
by outsiders, which I have named the Bridge of Allan main road precedence rule.
If you are approaching either of the mini roundabouts, which act as frontier posts to Bridge of Allan,
then any car on the main road within 50m of the mini roundabout takes precedence. Indeed they
usually speed up to ensure anyone seeking to enter the roundabouts from a side road is deterred
(unless they have a large Range Rover or Hummer --I have called this the Kenilworth Road residents’
exception to the precedent). So my advice this week is to generally respect the value of
roundabouts for traffic movement and also to be very wary when going through the Bridge of Allan
mini roundabouts.