Guidance Signs and Lane Designation

The handbook's Guidance content centres on lane-designation diagrams at roundabouts and multi-lane approaches — signs showing which movements each lane permits, so you can position yourself correctly before you arrive rather than guessing once you are committed.

How they work: each lane on the approach is drawn with its own permitted movement or movements. Read across the diagram, find the lane whose options include where you are going, and be in it in good time.

Worked examples from the official material:

• A lane marked with two options might permit you to continue straight ahead or turn left.
• A lane marked with one option restricts you to that movement only — no turns permitted from that lane at all.
• A lane at a roundabout marked with four options might permit a right turn (a quarter of the way round), a full return in the direction you came from (halfway), a left turn (three-quarters), or continuing straight through (all the way round).

That last example confirms something worth stating plainly, because it runs against what most people absorb from films and imported media: traffic circulates clockwise on a roundabout here. It follows directly from driving on the left — the central island stays on your right, and keeping a fixed point on your right as you travel around it means going clockwise. Anyone picturing an anticlockwise roundabout is picturing a right-hand-traffic country.

Why reading these early matters more than it sounds. Misreading which lane permits which movement, and discovering it only once you are boxed in by traffic on both sides, is one of the more common causes of roundabout errors: the wrong-lane approach, the wrong-lane exit, the late lane change across somebody's bonnet. Guidance signs exist specifically to prevent all three — but only if you read them at a distance where you can still act on what they say.