Roundabouts are supposed to keep traffic flowing. Cars ease in, curve around, and peel off at their exit, no stopping required. It is an elegant little system, right up until four buses decide to test it at the same time.
During a busy stretch of traffic in Oslo, Norway, four long articulated buses, the bendy kind with the accordion joint in the middle, approached the same roundabout from four different directions. And in a moment of almost mathematically perfect bad timing, they all entered it at once.
What happened next was inevitable. Each bus curved into the circle and found its path blocked by the next bus, which was in turn blocked by the next, which was blocked by the next. Four enormous vehicles, nose to tail, each one trapping the bus behind it in a flawless ring of gridlock. Nobody could go forward. Nobody could back up. The roundabout had become a perfect, self-locking knot of public transit.
The image of it went viral almost instantly, with people around the world marveling at the sheer geometric absurdity of it, and Norwegians treating it as a very on-brand national moment.
And here is the best part. This was not the first time Oslo’s buses had managed to tie themselves into a knot like this. The roundabout deadlock has become something of a recurring tradition.
Four Buses Entered an Oslo Roundabout at Once—Then Trapped Each Other in a Perfect Traffic Knot
