Farrell: How the heck are F-minus drivers supposed to use traffic circles?

My favorite traffic circle in Beaufort County — or my favorite “rotary,” as I grew up referring to them — is on Foreman Hill Road in greater Bluffton.

Foreman Hill Road is near my dog’s day care, which is a very normal thing for dog owners to pay for and yet a very strange thing for me to type.

“My dog’s day care.”

I picture my dead Irish relatives still alive, wearing their one damp sweater and having a flash-forward of what their descendants’ lives might be like.

“The strangest episode. … I’m just after having a nap and I dreamt of a place where dogs are called ‘babies’ and people refer to themselves as their dogs’ ‘mommy’ and the dogs have ‘lunch.’ Also, a man named Trump was …”

I will leave my dead relatives’ American presidential predictions out of this.

I discovered Foreman Hill Road last summer and immediately recognized it as the perfect shortcut for the times I need to go from day care to anywhere east of Malphrus Road and vice versa.

It’s a lovely and sun-dappled drive that makes U.S. 278 look like the autobahn, though it’s still a road on which it’s easy to drive faster than you intend.

Which is why speed bumps, many slow-your-roll signs and a teeny tiny speck of a roundabout were installed on the road about six months ago.

While this was entirely too late for poor old Senor Gato, a Foreman Hill family’s cat that was killed on this road last year by a careless driver, it was overdue and necessary.

But it’s the smallest roundabout in the history of roundabouts.

(OK, not necessarily. Mini-roundabouts are a legitimate mechanism used to slow traffic in residential neighborhoods. If I were Guinness, though, I’d be getting out the measuring tape on this one. Actually, they don’t even need a measuring tape. An index finger and thumb will do.)

Sometimes when I drive “around” the Foreman Hill Road rotary, I actually try to drive straight “through” it. Not “over” it, mind you. But rather, I try to traverse it without turning my wheel.

I can almost do it.

And when I drive by it — again, not “around” it — I still always say to myself, “In at 6, out at 12.”

It’s a habit I picked up in Ireland, where I learned that directions involving rotaries are given to you as if you were very much mistaken about the intersection ahead.

That is not a daunting traffic circle, no no, it is a secret clockface.

“In at 6, out at 9 …” is “Go three-quarters of the way around and exit. Just breathe.”

“In at 6, out at 3 …” is “No seriously. Calm down. You’re basically just taking a right.”

According to a story on The Island Packet’s and The Beaufort Gazette’s websites, Americans don’t like traffic circles.

According to comments on our Facebook page about the planned beautification of the Bluffton Road/Bluffton Parkway roundabout, that other story is pretty much true.

Yikes, do people hate that traffic circle.

I remember when it used to be, quite literally, a disgusting mess of traffic cones. Just traffic cones put in a circle as if the guy in charge of road ideas let his toddler figure it out that day.

And it was like this for a long time.

My personal panic upon approaching that situation was very much caused by a rerun of “The Brady Bunch” in which Marcia and Greg had to drive as closely as they could to a traffic cone that had an egg balanced on top of it.

If the egg fell, they lost.

Every day on that “circle” felt like somebody’s egg was about to get crushed.

The “new” rotary, by comparison, seems like a modern miracle. Though I get why drivers here don’t like it.

Bluffton is apparently terrible at driving, according to a report by ConsumerAffairs anyway. We’re the fifth worst in the state. We’re the F-minus of drivers.

Driving around a rotary requires at least a B-plus effort.

How can we be expected to do well on this exam with our extreme lack of skills?

I’ve drive around this rotary a lot without getting hit or hitting anyone, so I have a few tips for the drivers who hate it:

▪  Avoid it.

▪  Start thinking about your approach before you reach the circle. Are you an inner laner? Or are you an outer laner? These are the thoughts to have as you’re making your morning coffee.

▪  Lower that phone in your hand so that it at least looks like you’re trying.

▪  It’s not double-dutch. No need to stop-start-stop-start while waiting for the perfect time to enter. Just get in there when the circle is ready for you. It will accept you and then release you safely if you let it.

▪  Again, this isn’t jump rope. But you should assess the circle’s natural rhythm before flinging yourself into it like a frightened squirrel behind the wheel of a magic wheelie thing.

▪  Don’t you dare change your mind about where you’re going! Oh my gosh, in at 6 out at 9. Stay in my lane? You stay in yours! WE ALMOST JUST SIDESWIPED EACH OTHER. Stop Instagramming this!

This story was originally published March 23, 2016 at 5:09 PM with the headline "Farrell: How the heck are F-minus drivers supposed to use traffic circles?."