Spiral roundabouts are very tricky to negotiate and the tushmore spiral roundabout in Crawley (the one with all the traffic lights on near Sainsburys) is no exception. But how do you deal with a roundabout like this successfully?
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| Tushmore Spiral Roundabout, Crawley |
The Traffic Lights:
There are lots of sets of traffic lights on the roundabout and they are all very close together, so when you are on the roundabout always anticipate the lights changing and be prepare to stop if they do change. Sometimes it can be hard to work out which traffic light applies to you and hard to anticipate them changing while also being aware of the car around you.
The key to successfully be able to do this is to drive at a speed where you will have time to see all the traffic lights and work out in your head if they apply to you or not, at first you may need to drive a bit more slowly than the other cars so you can do this successfully, as with any bits of driving the more you do it the more confident you will become. Ultimately, personally, I would never drive more than 10mph in 2nd gear on this type of roundabout, if you go faster that this it will increase your braking distances so give you far less time to react to traffic lights changing and give you less time to deal with the other car, who may change lanes suddenly or straggle the lanes in error.
The Lanes:
The key thing is to stay in you lane and not to 'straggle' the lanes as there could be a car next to you that you could collide with. So once you have picked your lane stick to it and drive at a speed in which you can comfortably keep in you lane.
The most difficult thing to do on this roundabout is turning right or a 'U-Turn', as you will need to move into new lanes on a few occasions. See the diagram below and how a new lane starts to be created near the centre of the roundabout next to the traffic light.
To get use to the lanes I normally would suggest start off by going straight across the roundabout, as you will not need to move into a new lane and there will be less traffic lights to think about. Once you can successfully go straight ahead whilst keeping in your lane you can start to do a right turn, see below for the method.
How do you pick you lane? Well the key to this is planning on approach to the roundabout, look for road signs on approach and keep you destination in mind, for example if you wanted to go to the town centre we would need the right hand lane on approach accordingly to the sign below.
Once you are on the roundabout road markings should tell you which lane you need to be in, see below, we would now to need to use the middle lane. Please note, the below image does not show that the lane for B'TON (Brighton) is a new lane that appeared just after the previous set of traffic lights.
Now stick to that lane and and keep an eye out for road markings for Town Centre, if you follow the lane you will then naturally be taken into the left lane, no need to a lane change, see below image.
The finally bit is just to stay in your lane (i.e. the left lane) and it will take you to the town centre.
Yellow Box Junctions
As you will have seen from the above pictures the roundabout has lots of hatched yellow areas on it. You must not stop in these areas, they are there to keep parts of the roundabout clear to help with congestion, stopping in the areas could cause a traffic jam. Before you enter the yellow areas you need to be 100% sure that you can fully cross it without stopping in it, if you don't think you can fully cross it without stopping in it then do not enter the area.
Signalling
There normally no need to signal to come off these roundabouts, as most people can tell where you are going by the lane you are in. The only time you might need to signal is if you feel like someone would benefit from it, perhaps if a pedestrian was looking to cross the road on the exit you were taking, they are unlikely to know where you are going by your lane position, so putting a signal on will tell them you are coming their way, so they are less likely to start to cross the road.
Key Point - If you think you have got in the wrong lane then normally the best idea is to just 'go the wrong way' staying in the same lane, DON'T drastically change lanes. Changing lanes drastically can be very dangerous because on such a busy roundabout there are highly likely to be cars next to you all the time, so you could collide with them.
I won't lie to you, this roundabout is a very tricky one, one of the most difficult in Crawley, but like anything with driving the more you practice it the more confident you will be with it. Before attempting this roundabout you need to be happy to try it and should be dealing with 'normal' roundabout independently and also use to dealing with lots of traffic, without practice of these skills dealing with this roundabout will be very very difficult indeed.
Laurence Jacquemin ADI
