You go in. You go around. You come out. That’s the whole thing.
And yet every single day I watch someone stop inside the roundabout. Inside it. As if the concept of yielding to the left has broken their understanding of the physical world. They just stop, in the circle, and look at everyone else like we’re the problem.
Then there’s the blinker situation. If you exit a roundabout without signaling, you are choosing chaos. You are telling every other driver that your plans are a mystery. That’s not driving. That’s interpretive dance.
Last week a woman in a Volvo entered going the wrong direction. I didn’t even know that was possible. We stared at each other and both understood something had gone deeply wrong.
I’ve been driving forty-one years. Nothing has tested my patience like watching the Gallatin Valley interact with a circle.
Gerald T. Fencepost has lived in the valley twenty-eight years and drives a 2004 F-250. He has never once failed to use his blinker.
