Apparently Brits hate the Magic Roundabout, but it seems so shiny.. just the idea of a roundabout of roundabouts where the inner flow of traffic is reversed is really pretty. I'm sure it's one of those things that looks great in traffic flow simulations but falls apart when panicked drivers are trying to deal with each other and the unconventional traffic patterns.

I don't think most people in the UK who express an opinion on it have ever actually used it.

I used to live round the corner from the magic roundabout. It's actually fine. The best analogy I have for it is juggling, if I concentrate too much and overthink it I drop the balls. If you over-think the magic roundabout it can seem intimidating, but when you're actually there it makes much more sense and you just go with the flow. You're not dealing with the whole system in one go, most people just take it one roundabout at a time.

One of the reasons it seems to work is that people take it easy, everyone is paying attention to what they are doing, and most people take it at a sensible speed.

What I don't understand is what advantage it has over just a single big roundabout. A single car may be able to save a few seconds by going around in a different direction, but I can't picture any actual throughput advantage.

Needless complexity is all I see in it.

I'm not sure the Magic Roundabout would pose any problem for any sort of automated driving. It's basically just a nested roundabout- where you essentially have to give the right-of-way to traffic already on the roundabout.

If you can navigate a roundabout, you can navigate the magic roundabout - you just apply the same rules.

If anything, this is the sort of thing an automated system would excel over humans at - where the automation won't get confused by an uncommon application of a familiar ruleset.