The Nardi reminds me of the Turbot (front) and the Turbot 2 (rear) from André Franquin’s
Spirou et Fantasio so I looked for pictures and lo and behold:
An actual, drivable1), road legal Turbot 2 exists!2)
Apparently there’s also a Turbot MK I, but I haven’t found pictures yet.
1) Using the drivetrain and running gear from a Porsche 924.
2) In Monaco.
The '50s is not a bad era for car coachwork, actual or imagined. Post-war explosions of bottled-up, thwarted creative expression.
I try to tell my family that roundabouts are superior each time we go around our local roundabouts, but they just hate them irrationally.
Try faking to enter the next roundabout the wrong way round and see how your family reacts.
They’d kill me… or at least put me in traction!
Plus they occasionally lead to interesting videos when reckless drivers encounter them! (Better than T-boning an innocent driver, at least)
I thought that was The Italian Job? But that was Minis.
We live right by a roundabout and we hated it. There’d always be honking and broken bits of cars as they accelerated into it. I was out with my first aid a bunch of times and called ambulances and stuff. Eventually a truck driver killed some woman cycling home from the hospital and they put humps on the entrances and exits for pedestrians. Even before they painted the stripes on the road and had the flashing lights for pedestrians the behaviour changed overnight. It’s been improved further but I think the cycling infrastructure could do with a further upgrade.
I guess my point is that here they tend to put them in by default. They are not always designed well. Nor are lights (until they upgrade them the old ones don’t allow for people crossing two roads at once which is necessary). But done well as part of mixed use infrastructure and traffic calming (nothing makes people drive slower except physics or congestion) they can work really well.
@Otherbrother ’s gif is…. not a well designed roundabout. You want some calming to stop idiots ramping like that. Also, I’m pretty sure they shouldn’t work as ramps.
Anything can be a ramp if you approach it fast enough.
Or if you dig it up fast enough.
wild ramps are only available like that for a short time in the Spring
15 years ago:
And Milan, not Rome.
Now I’m wondering if it’s less a particular type of traffic control and more about people’s familiarity with them that causes more problems? Like, here, most people are not used to roundabouts, so when they are confronted by one, they tend to be more cautious and thoughtful than, say the typical 4 way stop?
Definitely. There is a mountain resort town around here that is entirely organized around roundabouts. The roundabouts are numbered, so that you can navigate relatively easily. “Oh, that [whatever] is just off Circle 5.” As the nearby city expanded, they grew their system around roundabouts, too. There’s a big movement now in the major city here to make all new construction/reconstruction and development use roundabouts instead of 4-way stops and traffic lights. That is definitely messing with people who aren’t used to them. But even as I curse people who pull up to an empty roundabout and come to a complete stop, it’s still better than those same drivers behaved at 4-way stops. There are just too many rules for people to remember at 4-way stops, considering that they are also on the phone and texting and checking their social media and drinking a 2000-calorie iced coffee drink, etc. A roundabout even gives them an easy chance to make up for a mistake when they aren’t paying attention and miss their turn, when they would otherwise make a surprise, completely illegal move and risk an accident rather than spend 30 seconds re-routing.
Thunderbirds are Go!
So, a Canadian manufacturer looking to acquire shipyards in the US.
And why would Putin ever allow that?
Trump’s response to question about allowing US to compete with Russia?: “I’ll get back to you on that.”
