Just jumped onto this thread, after avoiding it for some time. Regarding "roundabouts," I think they are the same thing we in the northeastern United States (the half-dozen states collectively known as "New England") call "rotaries". It's basically a traffic circle to handle cars coming from several different intersecting roads. They are common in my part of the country, but people from other parts of the U.S. hate them. It doesn't help that the rules seem to change periodically -- so there is no common understanding about whether you're supposed to yield to the oncoming traffic, or to the traffic that was already in the rotary.