Roundabout and Find Out

This article will probably add nothing to your life except the sweet comfort of mutual hatred toward one very specific thing: roundabouts.

What is it with Indonesia and roundabouts?

They’re everywhere. Residential clusters, neighborhood gates, main roads, side roads, and for some reason, even inside school compounds. It’s not just urban planning anymore, I am convinced it’s a full-blown fetish.

Now you might be thinking, “Gee Jake, you must really hate roundabouts.” I do. I can love them, in countries that know how to use them. Even in Malaysia, I think they work great. The people (mostly) obey the basic etiquette of using a round-about. Places where people yield, signal, and understand basic geometry.

But here? I hate them because somehow both the government and private developers seem to adore roundabouts, even though they clearly don’t work for the way we actually drive.

Sure, they can look nice. But you know what’s nicer than looking nice? Functioning properly.

And let’s be honest, not all of them even look good. Some are just glorified potholes with landscaping. Take the one in front of PIK Avenue….. what exactly is that? Even they had to slice a road through the roundabout just to relieve the mess it created. They had a ceremony when they finished cutting through the roundabout. How do I know this? I drove through when it happened.

And yet, people keep building them. Developers love them. Architects slip them into renders like they’re a cultural requirement. It’s like every urban planner read a single paragraph in a European road manual and thought, “Yeah, this is it. This is how we’ll become Denmark”, or whoever it is who invented roundabout.

We’re a country where people drive the wrong way on toll exits to save three minutes and a few drops of Pertamax. I mean Shell, this is 2025.

The amount of times this roundabout is closed due to high traffic

Roundabouts are built on one sacred principle: cooperation.

You yield, I go. I yield, you go. It’s a polite handshake between moving vehicles.But here? That handshake turns into a thumb war (I am very good at that, by the way).

Nobody yields. Nobody merges. Everyone just edges forward until someone flinches or crashes.

So instead of creating flow, roundabouts in Indonesia create confusion.People enter when they shouldn’t and they exit wherever they like, and sometimes they just sit in the middle, unsure, like they’re waiting for a spiritual sign.

Meanwhile, the guy who built it is sitting in an air-conditioned office saying,

“Well, we added a garden in the middle. That should help.”

Roundabouts don’t fix traffic here. They decorate it.

A roundabout says, "This place is fancy. This place has a fountain.”

But functionally? It's just a more expensive U-turn that now requires a satpam, or police with a whistle.

And the irony is, roundabouts were designed to remove the need for constant human control.But in Indonesia, they end up needing more people to manage the chaos.It’s like installing a self-cleaning toilet and still hiring someone to stand there and press the button.

If we’re being honest, most Indonesian roads would function better with a simple T-junction and traffic lights. Less aesthetic, but at least it doesn’t pretend to be smart.

And don’t even get me started on traffic cones.

So yes, I hate roundabouts in this country. As long as our motorists are still taking their bikes onto the sidewalk, we can forget roundabouts (Aguan, if you’re reading this).

But by all means, let’s keep building them. They look great on the drone footage, or the sky bar around Hotel Indonesia.