The San Francisco Bay Area is the world’s premier hub for innovation — home to Silicon Valley, the richest tech moguls and a host of billion-dollar start-ups.
But one feat of European engineering has left this high-flying region stumped: the roundabout.
The city of Hollister on the outskirts of Silicon Valley unveiled its first “turbo roundabout” in February in a nearly $15 million (£12 million) effort to improve safety at a dangerous junction.
Instead, the roundabout has resulted in a spike in accidents.
The first official report on its performance showed there was a crash every two and a half days on average, compared with one every eight days previously.
It seems locals are struggling to wrap their heads around how to navigate the roadway, which still counts as a new-fangled device across much of America.
As recently as 1990, the US had just three roundabouts. While the number has since increased considerably, they are still regarded as a foreign import.
According to the Roundabouts Database website, there were an estimated 10,000 in the US in 2022 (one per 33,330 people), while the UK has about 25,000 (one per 2,678 people) and France has almost 43,000 (one per 1,580 people).
What makes the Bay Area’s roundabout problem all the more surprising is that, contrary to its name, a turbo roundabout is actually a slower version of a traditional one.
First introduced in the Netherlands in 2000, the turbo roundabout has raised barriers that divide the three lanes of traffic, a design that should slow down drivers and prevent accidents.
Wayne Wallace, who lives near Hollister, said the most common blunder he had witnessed was when motorists tried to change lanes over the concrete dividers.
“I’ve seen people catching air jumping over it,” he told The Mercury News, a daily newspaper published in San Jose.
A video posted on TikTok shows one terrifying near-miss. A black coach starts driving the wrong way, narrowly avoiding an oncoming truck and forcing a car to stop.
Remarkably, the coach driver seemingly fails to realise his mistake and instead of taking the nearest exit, continues around the roundabout the wrong way, bringing him face to face with a column of oncoming traffic.
Anticipating some drivers might struggle with the new installation, Caltrans, the state transport agency, produced a video explaining exactly how the roundabout works. Yet the issues persist.
Jim Shivers, a spokesman for Caltrans, insisted it was too soon to draw a reliable conclusion on the installation’s safety and that American drivers would get to grips with it.
“There is typically a period of time following construction that travellers learn about the roundabout,” Shivers said. “Then, typically, those minor incidents, the concerns about the roundabout, all of that begins to cease.”
He adds: “People do understand how to use roundabouts in this country. And I would say to our friends overseas — there’s a learning curve, a short one.”