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The strange Magic Of Swindon’s 7-in-1 Roundabout

One of the last places you’d expect to find a great innovation in road technology is the rural United Kingdom, specifically Swindon. It’s a place more commonly known for its art galleries and preserved locomotives. But they do have one of the strangest roundabouts in the world – because it’s actually seven of them.

The way the Magic Roundabout (yes, that’s its actual name) works is…unique: traffic can enter and exit from any point, like a regular roundabout, but this one is divided into lanes such that you enter at one roundabout, get slingshotted around a bit, and exit at a completely different one. This allows for multiple paths to be taken through the roundabout while simultaneously ensuring a clean and smooth flow of traffic.

It’s even safer than a normal roundabout too, for one simple reason: traffic moves through it too slowly to actually cause an accident. You’ll notice in the video that most of the cars are crawling along, held up while the car in front waits for a chance to enter the desired roundabout. That’s certainly one way to reduce accidents.

Magic Roundabouts like the one in Swindon haven’t been constructed in high-density urban areas that could probably use more efficient flows of traffic, but when you think about it, traffic in cities probably doesn’t need to get any slower.

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