Road signage on the cheap endangers us all!

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Brandane

Legendary Member
Location
Costa Clyde
Following a trip in the car to Edinburgh for a course, and driving in wet and dark conditions, I have come up with a theory which potentially endangers us all. It's not an excuse for poor driving, but it certainly doesn't help.

I've noticed a huge increase in recent years of the use of white painted direction signs on the road surface, instead of properly mounted signposts at the side of the road. Presumably this is a cost cutting exercise as I can imagine there is some expense involved in the manufacture and mounting of proper signs. Paint on the road is fine, as long as you know it's there! But take a driver out of their regular environment and it's a different matter, as I have been finding out recently. On dark, wet, busy roads the white paint is all but invisible until you are quite literally almost on top of it. Especially because in true British style it is not renewed as often as it should be and can be faded to the point of uselessness.

It goes some way to explaining why you see so many drivers not looking beyond the few feet in front of their bonnet at roundabouts in particular, as they try to pick out lane markings and direction arrows on the road. It's maybe cheap, roads bosses, but it's dangerous and has the potential to cost lives!

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This abomination of a road is one local example. If you're going straight ahead you need to be in the left lane on approach to the first set of lights, but note the absence of arrows on the road until a few yards short of the lights. So if there's even a short queue of traffic you're not going to see them, even in good light conditions... Once through the lights you have to switch to the RIGHT lane to go straight ahead as left is for left turn only! Again the arrows are just prior to the mini roundabout, which is only about 30 yards from the lights... Fine if you're familiar with the road layout, but they don't consider someone driving a large vehicle coming across this on a wet dark night for the first time.
I consider myself a very experienced road user - bikes, motorbikes, cars, artics, and being driving since 1982. But I was struggling to negotiate similar road systems in Edinburgh traffic last week.
 
D

Deleted member 26715

Guest
Also the cutting of hedges seems to now not get reviewed, lots of hedges covering signs, the hedges are cut, but years ago the tractor driver would get out & trim up the the sign but hand, now they get as close to the sign with the tractor mounted unit & then start after the sign.
 

Pat "5mph"

A kilogrammicaly challenged woman
Moderator
Location
Glasgow
You are right.
It's the same when cycling on an unfamiliar road, sometimes the road markings are under the cars in front of you, then you're in the wrong lane for the direction you want to take ... and you get beeped at!
 

oldwheels

Legendary Member
Location
Isle of Mull
Driving into Paisley from the M8 eastbound looking for the hospital in the dark. There are signs but mostly hidden behind bushes and trees and impossible to make out especially on my own when watching other traffic takes priority. Many of us from rural parts further north are referred here which is really a bit of a nightmare. Public transport? Don’t even think about it.
 

Globalti

Legendary Member
In rural areas signs never get washed so if they're under trees they gradually become obscured by green mildew.

I've long thought that white paint manufacturers must give bungs to highways engineers to use as much paint as possible.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Ah but the advantage of the markings being obscured by short queues is that the extra queues caused by confused drivers changing lanes late or having second or third attempts at junctions make it easier to justify building more roads, which is more work for highways designers. ;)
 
D

Deleted member 26715

Guest
Other wonderful thing they do in South Yorkshire is, if it's 2 lanes breaking into 3 lanes, on some junction it's the left hand lane that breaks into two, on other lanes it's the right hand land, so you can easily end up in the wrong lane as you have no idea which lane with become the middle lane. Because of that we get morons coming off the M1 going immediately into the right hand lane because 5 miles down the Parkway the right hand lane becomes the middle lane.
 

Will Spin

Über Member
Also the cutting of hedges seems to now not get reviewed, lots of hedges covering signs, the hedges are cut, but years ago the tractor driver would get out & trim up the the sign but hand, now they get as close to the sign with the tractor mounted unit & then start after the sign.
Mostly, around here the tractor driver keeps going, trimming the signs as well!
 
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