this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
1199 points (96.7% liked)
Fuck Cars
11532 readers
2170 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
See a line through the sign! /s
But in all seriousness, road signs need to be consistent and convey very quickly what the message is to a road user. If someone has to decipher that a red ring means "do not", except for speed limits, then consistency is lost.
The problem I have with signs here in North America, is that they are largely just ignored 😫
Nobody has to decipher anything. Everyone is taught from childhood about the most important signs, everyone grasps basic rules and exceptions, and when you learn how to drive, you learn and memorize more obscure sings, and then you just know them, no deciphering needed. It's the same both in America and in the rest of the world.
You seem to think that American signs are intuitive and not require learning, but that's not true, it's just you're familiar with them, you know the rules and so it's easy for you.
I'll respectfully disagree, because there are plenty of studies that show a wide gap in understanding of road signs, with some being considerably more intuitive to understand than others.
As an example, have a look at the data below:
As you can see, the "no powered vehicle" sign (red line through it) was understood by nearly everyone, with no confusion.
Compare that to the "no cycling", "no pedestrian" or "no motor vehicle" signs below:
You have mass confusion, with very few people actually knowing what the sign means before they are trained. To me, that's a design flaw.
Other studies show a similar pattern.
This one for example, asked people from different countries to identify the meaning of various traffic signs.
I will point out that the ones which scored nearly perfectly identified, are the ones with a line through them; Signs with just coloured circles were very often misidentified, or understood as having the opposite meaning.
We can go back and forth on this (I don't want to), and while I do agree that education can reduce the chance of a sign being misunderstood, that misses the point completely.