Roundabouts (traffic circles)

Roundabouts: In technical traffic management terms, a roundabout is a way to convert “cross” traffic into “merge” and “diverge” traffic, which is safer.

Rule: On roundabouts, “give way to traffic on your right”.

Traffic Logic: One reason is to avoid “gridlock”. Imagine the roundabout to be a road with traffic going round continually. Traffic on the right is traffic already in the stream. If this traffic has to give way to traffic that is yet to join, nobody will be able to move. Hence, leaving the stream has priority over joining it.

The other logic to understand the rule is that doing it the other way results in unsafe “left side overtaking”.