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Originally Posted by Cynthetiq
almost forgot, it's also a way of easily reducing speeding because one cannot go in a straight line for very long without having to turn through the roundabout. It works well for snowy areas as they can still plow since there aren't speedbumps. It also gives a central area that most cities have begun using them as local artist spaces. Some older cities have been using them to house historical monuments from mausoleums (India) to statues of great leaders (Washington DC).
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There's a notorious roundabout just south of Uppsala. It's after a loooong stretch of straight boring road over the plain, and a bit too much south of the city itself for anyone to really expect it, so they have these raised lines in the asphalt a few hundred meters before that makes the car go BARABARABARA when you go over them just to warn the drivers and make them slow down, but people still go straight across - a friend of mine managed to do that in a truck! I don't know if a monument in the middle of that one would help or cause more accidents. Generally, I'm against stuff in the centre of roundabouts for that very reason. There are a few that have
ponds in the middle and that's just a recipe for disaster.
They can do amazing things for traffic flow though. There was a intersection here called "the Red Square" (since you ALWAYS had to wait at a red light there) but now it's a roundabout and it works really well.