Roundabouts
Introduction
A roundabout, also known as a roundabout (in Colombia, Spain—where both terms are used—and Mexico), oval (in Peru), redoma (in Colombia and Venezuela) or rondel (in Ecuador and El Salvador), is a road construction designed to facilitate the flow of traffic at intersections between highways and reduce the danger of accidents.
A roundabout is understood to be a type of intersection characterized by the fact that the sections that meet there are connected through a ring in which a rotating circulation is established around a central island. In them, preference is no longer given to the right, as was previously done at intersections. Now the preference falls on the vehicles that circulate on the lanes that make up the ring, compared to those that intend to access it through the access roads. The original form of use is given by the correct use of the lanes depending on the desired exit. That is, if our intention is to take the first or second exit of a cross roundabout, we must access the right lane to the outside and take one of those exits. If our intention is to take another exit further, we must access the interior through the left lane. In both cases, always respecting the preference of passage of the vehicles that were already circulating on the lanes of the rotating ring. The so-called split roundabouts in which two sections, generally opposite, are connected directly through the central island, so traffic passes from one to the other and does not go around it, are not roundabouts per se.
In Spanish road and public road regulations, and also in scientific literature, the word "roundabout" is not used in any case, the word "roundabout" being used. On the other hand, the Highway Code, as well as the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) in numerous of their written documents, refer to them with the term "roundabout",[1][2] which makes it quite clear that not only is there confusion and very important about the correct way to use them, but they are also not really clarified about how to name them. The correct name would be a roundabout, since roundabouts were the buildings that were placed at the beginning of the century in the middle of a street to generate a turn around it, not the road itself. Driving schools and their explanatory videos about it also use roundabouts and roundabouts interchangeably, with the first term reserved to define circular infrastructure. In colloquial language, the term rotunda is often used as a linguistic loanword from the Italian rotonda.