What are Common Hazards for Florida Cyclists in Roundabouts?

Video Transcription:

Hi, I'm Jim Dodson, The Florida Bike Guy. Welcome to our livestream. So what are the common dangers that cyclists face in a roundabout?

I wrote an article recently and I'm gonna talk about three things today, really the danger points that roundabouts pose for cyclists, number one, and number two, we're gonna talk about why designers really like these things. And three, I wanna point out some of the cases that we've encountered that ended up with cyclists being injured in a roundabout.

So roundabouts are becoming more and more popular. They're popular in Europe and they're popular here. They move traffic efficiently through an intersection. So for that reason designers really like them. We came across a study, though, in the Netherlands from 2009, and it really talked about, while designers love them for the efficiency and for, they actually decrease the number of serious collisions between motor vehicles in a roundabout, and across all users for the roundabout with one notable exception, and that's cyclists. And what they found is that cycling crashes with injury actually have increased with roundabouts in the study that we looked at. I've written about this as well.

So while they move traffic efficiently, the number of serious cases for cyclists in this particular study showed that it was an increasing hazard for us. And there are a couple of things to keep in mind about a roundabout. In terms of their danger points, remember, cars are entering, and the big danger points are where the cars enter and where they exit, because that's where you're typically going to cross one or more lanes. It's interesting that, in the study that we looked at in the Netherlands, most of their roundabouts were actually single-lane. And there are so fewer points of conflict in a single-lane roundabout versus a multi-lane roundabout. When you have cars entering in two lanes and going around a roundabout in two lanes, there's multiple places where they're going to cross a lane and exit across a lane as well. All of these just increase the likelihood of something going amiss, particularly where there's a cyclist.

Some roundabouts, particularly in Europe, have flyways or protected bike lanes through the roundabout. But quite frankly, the ones that I have experience with don't have that. They haven't become a part of the design feature in the United States, at least the ones that we've encountered here. And while the Dutch study really talked about the number of single-lane roundabouts, our experience is that, in Florida, we have predominantly two-lane roundabouts, where there's two lanes going around the roundabout, and many times two lanes entering the roundabout from various locations.

So... The other interesting thing that it was pointed out in the study was that so few motorists ever encounter a bicyclist in a roundabout. So at the few times they go through them, they don't typically see a bicyclist, so when they come to a roundabout they're not thinking cyclist. They're not thinking to look for cyclists. They're not raising that level of awareness to maybe even be looking for us. It's true that, in most cycling crashes, the most common thing that the driver says after the crash has been completed is, "I never saw them," and that definitely holds true for the roundabout cases.

We had a case recently where a driver came into the roundabout staring, oddly enough, at the vehicle right next to the driver, which had some advertising. It was a delivery truck for a big company, and this person admitted, after the fact, they were staring at the side of the truck as they entered the roundabout and struck our client. So there's a lot of visual distractions in a roundabout. You have drivers who typically aren't looking for cyclists. They're not really that familiar with expecting a cyclist in a roundabout. And finally, there's a lot of visual clutter for drivers everywhere, but particularly through a roundabout. They've gotta be conscious of cars coming from their left. Sometimes there's a car coming on the inner lane. Sometimes in the outer lane. Driver may be entering from the left lane or they could be entering from the right lane. So they're looking left, they're looking right. There's just a lot of moving parts, and so the opportunity for a cyclist to get lost in that mix, visually, for the driver, it goes up, in my view, exponentially. So that's why, when we, as cyclists, are going through a roundabout, you've got to assume that no car sees you and ride your bike accordingly. You can't assume that they see you, even if they're looking at you. You have to assume that they've never seen you.

So... The other thing that I've observed is that most drivers themselves just don't understand how to operate safely around a roundabout. If there's a two-lane roundabout, there's diagrams that you'll see on the side of the road before they enter the roundabout itself,