This morning's commute and other commuting stories

Wins disagreement with Oliver in a single post. Have that, internets.

Sort of. You would have done if you had pointed out the give-way lines at the northern entrance. :) You certainly made me look at it again.

This is, by the way, a confusing situation with the design. The full give-way markings are most likely an attempt to deal with the problem here that traffic from Balcombe Road north and Victoria Road gets into conflict quite a lot, probably because of the poor sightlines and the geometry of the junction. It's not a junction with a lot of collisions, in fact there have only been four over the last ten years, but perhaps there were more before those were added.

The normal roundabout give-way markings basically say that drivers or riders arriving at the markings should yield to traffic in the circulatory carriageway. Ordinary give-way markings with double lines are designed to govern priority at priority junctions where there is no separate road (the circulatory carriageway) inscribed in the junction. To paint them at the entrance to a roundabout is therefore odd. That's obviously the case at a lot of large roundabouts in particular, and at many with non-standard geometry and issues with the surrounding network that mean traffic doesn't flow through a junction as the theory of roundabout design would have it.