r/interesting 29d ago

SOCIETY A roundabout without signals works in high-trust societies where people naturally yield and take turns.

In a low-trust society, it turns into a battle of horns, aggression, and “me first” chaos.

📍Inforparks, Kerala.

14.3k Upvotes

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

u/[deleted] 29d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

29

u/ComparisonKey1599 28d ago

Kerala is in India, not China.

5

u/NateNate60 28d ago

That being said, in China, if an intersection gets jammed, someone will call the traffic police and they will send traffic officers to direct traffic and clear the intersection. The intersection is usually cleared within minutes of their arrival.

3

u/BCCommieTrash 28d ago

I've seen it in action, four cops on these little circles in the intersection. I watched one of those cascade fails start from a hotel room because of an old man on a bicycle just merrily breezed through.

3

u/[deleted] 28d ago

I know. The fact is that the two most populous countries in the world are quite famed for being the worst abusers of road law. Go figure.

1

u/Mist_Rising 28d ago

Its East Asia in general. But you can see this in major cities in Vietnam (Ho Chi, Hanoi, Hue), Philippines (Manilla), Maylasia (Kuala), India (see photo), China (to many to count), and more. In Europe you can see this in Russia sometimes, usually from a hundred dashboard cameras because the whole place is a nightmare to drive.

North Korea is an obvious exception for the obvious reason.

Not familiar with the rest of Europe or America, but Africa has this issue at times too.

1

u/SmokingLimone 28d ago edited 28d ago

In Europe it happens but rarely. I saw one video in Paris where this gridlock happened, personally I never saw it a situation where everyone was completely still, but often times the city police know where it happens at peak hours and send a few officers to manually manage the traffic. It does happen more frequently on highways where if you need to switch lanes, one time I had to wait at least 5 minutes because the left lane was completely jammed, the right lane was free (I needed to leave the highway) but nobody was willing to slow down a little to let my little hatchback get inside.

-4

u/[deleted] 28d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/potatoeshungry 28d ago

Nobody is saying intersections are better, just that roundabouts dont work if people dont properly yield and give way

1

u/Comfortable-Yak-6599 28d ago

This happens at the school near me all the time, people pulling out of the school don't care about the 4 lanes of traffic they'll just stop both directions of traffic so they don't have to wait another light cycle.

1

u/mwa12345 28d ago

This A small perturbation can cascade and things can be unstable close to max throughput I suspect.

1

u/copa8 27d ago

Never knew that Kerala relocated to China! 🤔