SHA has a flash animation on how to ride your bike through a roundabout. Well with two lanes entering and leaving the roundabout and only one lane really wide lane in the middle, these things can get confusing. Best advice I can give you is pretend your bike is the middle of a car and ride like a car through the roundabout in that lane position and not to the far right.
SHA also present the option on how to cross the roundabout like a pedestrian, well it is an option though the riding on the sidewalk bit is a bit questionable.
https://www.sha.state.md.us/Pages/Roundabouts.aspx?d=86oldId.2010072811391790
4 Replies to “Traveling Maryland’s Roundabouts by bike”
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Is a roundabout erroneously striped if there are only single lane feeds in and out of the roundabout, but two lanes in the roundabout?
iodaniell
I’m seeing if I can get the NCUTCD-BTC to comment on this, stay tuned.
And John LaPlante, a very experienced traffic engineer from Chicago, replied right away:
LaPlante wrote, “There should never be two lanes within a roundabout with only single lane entries and exits. An extra wide roundabout encourages cutting straight across at higher speeds than the design speed and can increase crash severity and decrease yielding to peds on the exit roadway. Rather, the inner lane should be paved with bricks or cobblestones to allow large truck rear wheel or trailer tracking but discourage high speed cut throughs. But what do I know, I am just a traffic engineer.”
So my question is where is this roundabout?
Barry,
Here’s the coordinates – 39.2988380, -76.4394808 to that roundabout.
The Hyde Park Rd feeds are single lanes, for sure, and I think the Rt 702 feed is funneled down from two lanes to one lane on the north and south ends, but Google Maps zoomed in definitely shows two lanes in the roundabout.
iodaniell