But for a pedestrian in a populated area, roundabouts are not an improvement.
Quick, how does a pedestrian safely cross a lane of traffic? Is it while dodging moving traffic, or does it involve traffic coming to a stop?
If you said the first, I hereby revoke your license to design public infrastructure. For pedestrians to safely cross a lane of traffic, cars need to come a stop, period.
And the whole selling point of a roundabout is that cars don't come to a stop. This is fine for rural areas or large interchanges. But for anywhere that pedestrians are expected to be, roundabouts make the environment more hostile.
And this is before we consider that to cross a roundabout requires setting the pedestrian crossings back from the intersection, forcing pedestrians to zig-zag in order to use them.
And this is also before we consider that we know for a fact that shallower turns (which allow cars to retain more speed) are less safe than sharper turns (which require cars to shed speed), which further exacerbates the pedestrian safety issue.
To say nothing of the fact that roundabouts preclude implementing pedestrian scrambles, which are the safest and most efficient form of pedestrian crossing.
Roundabouts are a solution to a problem of making roads safer for cars, at the expense of pedestrians and cyclists. They exacerbate the problem of our depressingly car-oriented infrastructure. "But the stats say they're safer!" Yeah, and when Google reduced page sizes they saw their average latencies increase. This is a fun way of lying with statistics. Sure, fatalities from roundabouts go down when you create such a human-hostile environment that every pedestrian and cyclist goes out of their way to avoid it, or just throws their hands up in despair and buys a car, since it's a signal that car owners are the only thing people worth optimizing for.