Roundabouts are becoming more common in Canada, but too many Canadian drivers behave as if they have never seen one before. On my monthly trip to the allergist, I take a county road that eventually becomes a major arterial street in the city of Waterloo, which -- from the sudden proliferation of roundabouts -- evidently employed a planner who had studied in Europe. The locals take each one as a venture into the lions' den, either delicately tip-toeing in or bashing through as if waving a large weapon, which I guess they are.

Stratford, where I live, has several awkward intersections that could do with a roundabout. The early Victorian surveyors who laid out the original townsite liked to reconcile their grids with the free-form landscape by adding "gores", or angled lot and concession lines, that inevitably led to the development of angled roads and oddly shaped city blocks. One such gore ends up at the intersection of two major arterials, creating a goose-foot crossroads where I have to crank my neck around to the left like an owl to avoid being T-boned by a truck heading for London. A roundabout there would be a blessing, but Stratford town council would have to expropriate one end of a small strip mall to make room for it; most unlikely.