Yesterday Lew Rockwell linked to a Free Republic article on traffic circles, claiming they are bad socialist road design.  I beg to disagree with Mr. Rockwell and the "Freepers," and sing the praises of traffic circles (Florida and Australia), rotaries (New England) and roundabouts (England).  When properly designed and intelligently used they are the epitome of anarchism in action, while the more common stop light is a better metaphor for socialism.

With rotaries, each driver susses out the situation and enters the fray at his chosen optimal time, minimizing his personal travel time.  With "dumbed-down" traffic lights, on the other hand, an outside authority tells the driver whether he's free to go or must wait.  The traffic light even makes you wait when the road is clear, because it's programmed by some central-planning traffic engineer to "optimize" traffic flow (unless it's one of them newfangled magnetic sensor types, which never work anyhow).  Thus traffic lights are a one-size-fits-all authoritarian solution, while rotaries are laissez faire.  Rotaries only work well if they are large enough that you can go through them pretty fast if there's little traffic, and in fairness the Freeper article was mostly complaining about small ones designed to slow traffic for safety reasons.

Many of the quoted complaints about rotaries are from drivers who haven't bothered to learn their proper use, or are terrified at the thought of making personal decisions.  Some are doubtless the same egalitarians who send their kids to public schools for moral reasons.  Certainly the risks of fender benders are greater in rotaries, but so are the rewards, and nobody ever said that freedom is risk-free.  If there are a lot of drivers who don't know how to navigate them safely, then the costs (risks) go up.  Homeowners' insurance works the same way, as my premiums go up if other customers don't understand furnace safety, for example.

After years living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where our motto was "transportation through intimidation," I consider myself something of an expert on using rotaries.  As you approach them you simply glance a bit to your left to see who's coming.  If it's clear, you enter the rotary.  My biggest shock was my first driving experience in Canberra, Australia where traffic circles populate the roads like neocons in the Bush White House.  In Australia, you see, since you're driving on the left, the traffic proceed in a clockwise direction, so you must look to your right before entering.  Fortunately I avoided getting into an accident there, in spite of the fact that centrally planned Canberra is probably the worst-designed town in the world.

Actually, rotaries are the optimal solution only for a moderately traveled road.  When there's little traffic, stop or yield signs are best, and when there's major rush-hour traffic, stop lights should be employed to avoid the "clogged rotary" syndrome.