General Chat

Round here the big, expensive cars are usually first to move over. I think they are afraid of being damaged by a cheaper car. :-(

It occurred to me that if you were using voice recognition systems then command like

sentences would be the order of the day and some of the niceties may be lost.
With this in mind I decided to try it out on my google home.

I prefixed the command with please and it worked.

Then I asked it to stop. Afterwards I said thank you google to which she replied “ It is a pleasure to serve.” ;-) ;-) ;-)

Yes I could be making much better use of my time :-D :-D :-D

JoyL .............

There are hardly any roundabouts in the US, so Americans don't know how to use them! The first one was built around 1992 in a Florida town, and more are being built.

This made me laugh .............

https://www.heraldtribune.com/article/LK/20090621/News/605215584/SH#:
~:text=The%20first%20roundabout%20in%20America,for%20high%2Dspeed%20vehicle%20operation.


There used to be a huge roundabout in Halifax, NS, which they called the Armdale Rotary, that had traffic from 5 different directions. It had been designed in the 1940s to handle no more than 20,000 cars a day, by the 2000s there were 60,000 a day.

It confused even the Haligonians! So you can imagine what havoc Americans could cause :-D

In Vancouver, we have lots of small circles (as we usually call them) at intersections of residential roads where traffic has got busier due to "rat runners" .......... drivers trying to avoid jams on nearby main roads. Driver HAVE to slow down going round these because they are so small! The early ones were raised and cemented over, but then drivers in a hurry just used to drive over them, so now, they are raised a little higher, and grass planted there, which is never cut. People in the area can take over, and plant perennials, no shrubs and certainly no trees!

It made me laugh too, Sylvia. :-D

What you call small circles will be our mini roundabouts I expect.

When our last roundabout was built (quite a few years ago now) it foxed many who had never come across sitting in a lane in the middle of a roundabout before. Sunderland, however had already built similar and lucky for me I had travelled through several times because I had seen two cars facing each other in the middle of our foxy roundabout - obviously the layout was unfamiliar to one of them.

I thought at the time that it would probably have been better to leave it as an ordinary roundabout with traffic lights, as it was as that is what most drivers found familiar.

As I no longer go that way to work, I often wonder what overseas visitors make of it.