Footage captured of Americans using a Kentucky roundabout for the first time after it opened and it's absolute chaos to watch

There are few things more confusing for a driver than arriving at a road layout you’ve never seen before, and this Kentucky roundabout certainly caused some problems.

Footage from the opening of a new mini-roundabout in northeastern Kentucky showed several drivers appearing to have absolutely no idea what to do.

Cars took strange routes, went the wrong way around the circle, and generally made the whole thing look like a free-for-all.

But there is a little more to the story than the chaotic footage initially suggests.

Drivers appeared completely baffled by the new roundabout

The roundabout was built at the intersection of US 60 and KY 801 near Farmers, Kentucky, close to the Bath-Rowan county line.

When footage of the new car roundabout circulated, it showed several vehicles struggling to navigate the unfamiliar layout.

Some cars appeared to enter from the wrong side, while others travelled around the circle in the opposite direction to what you’d expect from a conventional US roundabout.

One particularly memorable moment involved a car just stopping in the middle of the roundabout without going off at its exit.

For anyone used to driving around European roundabouts, the footage was painful to watch.

However, there’s an important detail that makes the footage look even more confusing than it really was.

The footage was actually filmed while the roundabout was still being completed, and traffic was being controlled by flaggers.

A later explanation from Walker Construction indicated that vehicles were being released from one approach at a time as work continued, meaning this wasn’t simply a case of an entire road full of drivers being let loose on a brand-new roundabout.

It was built to make the road safer

Despite the chaos in the footage, the roundabout wasn’t installed just to make life more difficult for local drivers.

The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet replaced the previous four-way stop because the intersection had experienced high-speed crashes, including serious T-bone collisions.

Engineers believed the roundabout would reduce the number of places where vehicles could collide at right angles while also forcing approaching traffic to slow down.

It was also designed as a mini-roundabout, meaning its central island is small enough for larger vehicles such as trucks, RVs and vehicles towing boats to drive over when necessary.

That was particularly useful here because the junction provides access to the Cave Run Lake recreation area.

KYTC says roundabouts can reduce serious crashes by as much as 80 percent, while the Federal Highway Administration recommends that drivers approaching one yield to traffic already circulating in the roundabout.

And despite the initial confusion, the roundabout has remained part of the road network.

In fact, KYTC’s current information still lists the US 60 and KY 801 junction as an example of the mini-roundabout design and explains why the agency chose it for the location.

So while the footage makes it look like Kentucky drivers collectively forgot how roads work, the reality is slightly less dramatic.

They were dealing with a brand-new road layout while construction crews were still controlling how traffic entered it.

Still, watching some of those cars attempt to navigate the circle for the first time is pretty spectacular and without the context, the over the top clown music makes sense.