When I returned from Cyprus in early July, I drove the (Woodcroft) Parkway and was confronted by a curious sign: "SLOW WORK ZONE." Well, finally, I thought. Road construction is always slow, but you don't often see a contractor admitting it.

Yet another place where punctuation could have made a difference. But grammer is beside the point. We are getting a roundabout (rotary, traffic circle) at the corner of Woodcroft Parkway and Highgate Drive. Orange construction barrells have been set up; earth has been scraped out. If you act like a grammer snob, you will probably end up hurt, because it's true, you need to drive slowly through that work zone.

This traffic feature has been in the works for a long time. I once went to a Woodcroft Homeowners Association meeting with a neighbor to advocate for something whose importance was so great I have forgotten it, and those present were talking about the roundabout way back then. It's true that we need something there. Of all the corners in Woodcroft, that is the one you are most likely to see broken glass, bent pieces of chrome, cars on the side of the road and Durham's finest taking down insurance policy numbers.

Yet I suppose there was no way we rated a stoplight there, deep in the heart of a residential area, where a stoplight would look out of place.

In Europe, roundabouts are ho-hum. Either the person circling gets the right-of-way, or the person entering gets it, but you find that out in Driver's Ed as a teenager. Of the circle drive around the Arc de Tromphe in Paris, my uncle advises this: "Just dive in there and keep driving. If they don't let you in, there will be a one-hundred car pileup."

At the junction of Highway 751 and Erwin Road (currently closed because of bridge construction, by the way), drivers have been dealing with a roundabout for a couple of years.

This is not your run-of-the-mill traffic circle, however. There is a dedicated right lane for drivers making a right from Erwin north to 751 east, or from 751 east to Erwin south. And the north part of the circle gets little or no traffic. It is an entrance to Duke Forest. So, though I never have trouble negotiating that particular challenge, the Highgate-Woodcroft Parkway one may be a different story.

Presumably, sings will tell us who has the right of way. And that circular hunk of land in the center of the intersection is bound to slow Parkway drivers down. Recently on a radio show a woman admitted she had been stopped doing 50 in a 35 zone. "It just isn't a street where doing 35 makes sense," she told the hosts. That's Woodcroft Parkway in a nutshell -- except when someone from Highgate is trying to get a fender in edgewise.

In any case, this roundabout will help us further to resemble our British neighbors, who have plenty of traffic circles, as well as place names like Woodcroft, Durham and Highgate.

While waiting for the slow work zone to turn into a roundabout, readers might want to check out the site www.trianglesigns.org, which documents the zany road signage in our metropolitan area and beyond. There are a few roundabout signs to contemplate. Or you can read the author's wonderful essay pm why he created the site. It opens: "Call me crazy, heck call me a fool. Maybe I don't have too much going on in my seemingly mundane existence to come up with something useful. Yet somehow, I have a rather interesting passion that I desire to share with the world."

Don't we all.