Monday, 30th March 2026
I Passed My Driving Test—and And I Have Something to Say
I passed my driving test today. Finally. Long sigh.
Goodbye to the UK learner system, with all its quirks and frustrations. Goodbye to the overpriced lessons, the examiner theatre, and the months of waiting for a slot. It's done.
But since I'm in a reflective mood, let me leave with one parting observation -- because I genuinely could talk about UK roundabout design for an entire day without repeating myself.
The roundabout, as a concept, was designed for light, manageable traffic. The logic is elegant in theory: no signals, drivers yield naturally, traffic flows continuously. It works beautifully in a quiet market town. It does not work in a city of tens of millions of people and millions of cars -- and the infrastructure itself quietly admits this. When a roundabout is functioning as intended, you don't need traffic lights on it. The moment you start bolting signals onto a roundabout, you're essentially acknowledging that the original design has been overwhelmed.
Take the two major roundabouts near Mill Hill test centre, where I passed my test. Apex Corner and Mill Hill Circus — both traffic light controlled. Mill Hill Circus goes further: six "keep clear" boxes painted across the roundabout itself. Six. That's not a roundabout anymore, that's a signalised junction that happens to be circular. The keep clear boxes exist precisely because without them, the roundabout gridlocks. Drivers from one arm block the path of drivers from another, and the whole thing seizes up.
The deeper problem is that roundabouts depend entirely on every driver behaving correctly. In low-traffic environments, that's a reasonable assumption. In a dense urban area, it only takes one confused driver, one hesitation, one mistake -- and the whole system backs up. There's no mechanism to absorb the error. Traffic lights, for all their inefficiency, at least impose order. A roundabout just hopes for the best.
If nothing structurally changes, driving tests in the UK -- particularly in London -- are only going to get harder. The roads are more congested, the junctions more patched-together, and the margin for error on test shrinks accordingly. I got through it. But the system isn't getting any easier to navigate, for learners or anyone else.