Please note that this is an old post, and the layout of the Racecourse Roundabout is not longer as described here.
The article How to do Roundabouts is one of the most popular on the blog, and I often get questions from people regarding roundabouts in their areas. Some of these I add to that main article, some I write additional articles about, and most I just give a private opinion via email.
I noticed someone ask on a forum about roundabouts which only have a single lane. Apparently, the ADI in question had been spoken to by an examiner about their pupil not driving all around the edge of a roundabout. The examiner apparently said that even if a roundabout only has one lane on approach then candidates should keep to the left. More on this later.
First of all, there is no one answer or solution which fits every roundabout. Secondly – and the ADI mentioned above did not provide the actual location – you need to understand the roundabout in question.
The photo above is the Racecourse Roundabout in Nottingham. Candidates taking their tests at Colwick often have to negotiate it twice (and three times wouldn’t be out of the question). Look at the darkened tyre marks travelling from left to right – everyone and his dog takes that “straight” route through the roundabout.
When I was still a wet-behind-the-ears ADI, I naively taught my pupils to go all around the outside edge – just like you’d do if you were engaging 100% of your Colourfile Presenter and 0% of your brain. It was only after I discovered that, especially during rush hour, going round the edge is a sure fire way of having every prat travelling towards Doncaster use the opportunity to overtake and sound their horn, I got wise and quickly started teaching my pupils to take the same line as everyone else. THERE ARE NOT TWO LANES ON THIS ROUNDABOUT. It may well be wide enough for two or even three cars, but at no point are cars following correct lane discipline travelling legitimately side by side around it.
Another problem with driving à la Colourfile is that the outer edge of a roundabout is where all the glass and nails collect – usually embedded in inch-thick piles of other crap, all nicely poised to poke right into your tyre if you drive through it – and in the case of the Racecourse Roundabout, since very few other drivers except a few learners go out there, there’s loads of the stuff. There’s no way I want my pupils driving in that – they have enough ways of trying to @%£$ up my car as it is, without me showing them another.
Another local roundabout, this one over on the Beeston side, is also definitely only one lane wide. Yes, you could sit two cars side by side, but every feed road is only one car wide at the entry point. IT IS ABSOLUTELY ONLY ONE LANE WIDE.
It would be nice if all roundabout neatly met these same criteria, but they don’t. This next one is near the location of the old Chalfont Drive test centre (now demolished), and it used to feature on every test conducted there.
Although it isn’t marked with lanes, it IS possible for two cars to legitimately be side by side as they negotiate this one. They probably shouldn’t, but there is no reason why they can’t (and it’s in Beechdale, so they often do). Three of the feed roads are marked as being two lanes wide, and unlike the Racecourse example these lanes feed past other exits, which further suggests two implied lanes on the roundabout (i.e. both lanes can emerge on to it simultaneously). All this means that adopting a left or right hand lane position becomes more worthy of consideration.
Going back to the original idea that an examiner had suggested candidates should be hugging the left lane when going straight ahead on such roundabouts, if he said that concerning the first two examples here he would be wholly wrong. It is downright dangerous on the Racecourse roundabout, and totally pointless on the one in Bramcote.
In the case of the Robin’s Wood Road example, though, the examiner would perhaps have a point, since not treating it as two lanes wide would mean encroaching on other traffic. And this is why roundabouts can be annoyingly hard to place into any single pigeon-hole as far as procedure is concerned. There is no single rule that works on all of them, but that doesn’t stop some instructors trying to make one up (the totally fallacious “12 o’clock rule”, for example) or sticking doggedly with their Colourfile approach (I see plenty of them driving wide on the Racecourse example when I’m following them, and it does cause confusion – particularly if they’re driving slowly).
The ADI mentioned at the start of this article didn’t provide a map reference for the roundabout which had triggered the comment, and it would be both useful and interesting to see the layout and to know how locals deal with it. Although it is possible that the examiner was wrong (the primary assumption on most forums), it is also possible that the ADI has missed something. However, if the roundabout was similar to either of the first two, a polite word with the examiner’s manager might be worthwhile.
Apparently, this is the roundabout the examiner was referring to. Having now seen this, I would say that the examiner certainly had a point, though without being from around there I couldn’t give a definite answer.
The reason is that at least one feed road is wide enough to allow two cars to get on to the roundabout at the same time, and at least one is wide enough to allow two to exit. The roundabout is easily wide enough to accommodate two vehicles and it is also of a fairly substantial size (in all my own local examples, above, the roundabouts are small).
Indeed, the photo shows a van and a car traversing the roundabout side by side and although the van appears to only be turning left, it would be extremely easy for him to continue to his 2nd exit if he changed his mind without having broken any rule of the road about lane markings on the feed (there aren’t any). Having said that, the tyre markings do suggest that the locals treat it as a single lane most of the time.
This definitely needs an official answer from the local test centre – no one else could give a definitive one.
A further point to consider is that some examiners WILL allow straight-lining – not hugging the left lane where there are two or more – when going ahead on unmarked roundabouts IF the appropriate checks are made to make sure no other vehicles are present.
I have covered it in more detail in the How to do Roundabouts article, but a few hundred metres before the Racecourse roundabout in Nottingham is the Virgin roundabout. It has two lanes in and two lanes out, but isn’t delineated on the roundabout itself. I always teach pupils to stay in their lane when they negotiate it – so to approach in the left, stay left, and hug the left when going straight ahead. If they don’t do this, it is invariably because they forgot or just weren’t aware of where the car was. I have heard several examiners say something like this in the debrief:
When we came to the roundabout you were in the left hand lane. As you crossed the roundabout to go ahead you [straight-lined] it – which is perfectly OK – but you didn’t check your right mirror to make sure it was clear.
Seriously, I have heard this a couple of times from different examiners and the fail goes down under “mirrors”. To be honest, I wish they wouldn’t explain it like this, because I know full well that the reason my pupil did it was because they were effectively wearing a blindfold at that moment in time and possibly weren’t even aware of any lanes, let alone who might be in any neighbouring ones. At the very least, their spatial awareness at that point was lacking, and it had nothing to do with not checking mirrors. The roundabout is very narrow and even slight encroachment can draw hoots of irritation from other drivers who are trying to overtake where they shouldn’t. It is why this particular one is what I call a “test killer”.
I can only speak for one or two examiners in Nottingham from whom I have heard this explanation, and it might not apply to other examiners or in other towns and cities.