21–30 of 62 posts
Slightly off topic... UK road signs have a very clear and consistent color scheme based on the category of road. E.g., blue background for motorways, green background for A roads. This scheme was (maybe still is) reflected in the color of roads on printed maps. Google Maps also used this scheme some years ago. I understand their reasoning, but the day Google standardized on the current yellow & white scheme was a sad…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you native to the UK? (I.e. do you have a good knowledge of the cities and areas you are driving to and passing by?) Is there a system you are using to navigate / prepare when driving to areas that are new to you? Particularly off motorways?
I'm native to the UK, but I've not found any of the difficulties that you mention in your previous post. I'm 49, so I'm from the pre-sat-nav generation, and I will generally not use one [x] until I get to the city in question, or traffic/isues necessitate it, so I'll navigate from major town to major town to get where I'm going. I don't find that they will generally disappear from signs (unless you're past them), and…
The radial numbering can be a useful ‘signpost’. As an anti-invasion tactic during World War II, a civil defence measure was to remove many road signs. That’d stop those nazis in their tracks. So to this day, I find the UK a difficult country to navigate by signs alone as they are often absent at important local junctions. In many other parts of the world, you can trace your way from a major destination by signs at f…
I completely agree. Without savnat it would be very hard to navigate in the UK for me. Even with preparation ahead of time. The only useful feature in the UK vs other EU countries I have driven in are compass directions: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST. Some motorways also have reflectors on the lanes to guide you, which is great and I don't remember from Germany at least. Everything else is weird. Starting from the typogra…
At least the UK (on the non-minor roads) has decent "cat's eyes" that reflect light back very well from the car's headlights, as they have actual mirrors in them.
Oz and NZ instead have blocks of plastic embedded in the road instead with a reflective strip on, which in terms of visibility distance is very noticeably poorer (i.e. the reflective power is much less).
A855 is single lane around most of the island. Not a single lane each way, but a single lane with little pullouts every so often to let oncoming traffic past. We drove extremely defensively. However, the scenery was top notch.
It is also very easy to remember and I still remember my former school's postcode despite have not been there for more than 20 years. It is quite an achievement given that I sometimes even forget my current car's registration number.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_King...
The radial numbering can be a useful ‘signpost’. As an anti-invasion tactic during World War II, a civil defence measure was to remove many road signs. That’d stop those nazis in their tracks. So to this day, I find the UK a difficult country to navigate by signs alone as they are often absent at important local junctions. In many other parts of the world, you can trace your way from a major destination by signs at f…
I completely agree. Without savnat it would be very hard to navigate in the UK for me. Even with preparation ahead of time. The only useful feature in the UK vs other EU countries I have driven in are compass directions: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST. Some motorways also have reflectors on the lanes to guide you, which is great and I don't remember from Germany at least. Everything else is weird. Starting from the typogra…
I am from the UK and this makes driving in a new area of the UK very difficult for me. I don’t know if it’s the same in other countries as I’ve never driven in another country.
If the roads are busy then other cars are on top of the direction arrows making it impossible to know which lane to be in when approaching a lot of roundabouts or junctions.
It's an okay system but apathy has resulted in abnormalities, such as the A5-M1 Link Road leaving a bunch of routes in Dunstable out of zone. The A14, as conceived in the 90s, has always started out of zone because that was the easiest two-digit number to steal from another route. Many old A-roads have been chopped into pieces because of motorway replacements or to encourage heavy traffic to use more suitable routes,…
The radial numbering can be a useful ‘signpost’. As an anti-invasion tactic during World War II, a civil defence measure was to remove many road signs. That’d stop those nazis in their tracks. So to this day, I find the UK a difficult country to navigate by signs alone as they are often absent at important local junctions. In many other parts of the world, you can trace your way from a major destination by signs at f…
I completely agree. Without savnat it would be very hard to navigate in the UK for me. Even with preparation ahead of time. The only useful feature in the UK vs other EU countries I have driven in are compass directions: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST. Some motorways also have reflectors on the lanes to guide you, which is great and I don't remember from Germany at least. Everything else is weird. Starting from the typogra…
It was specifically designed to be legible at a distance when moving at speed, as well as under poor driving conditions. I think it does that job well, and it's one of the reasons many other countries have adopted it--the letterforms are freely available for anyone to use.
While are are not on the topic, anyone want to help me petition our senators to get all U.S. Interstate exits to be numbered by their mile marker rather than sequentially? Know that exit 32 is at mile marker 32 provides me so much more information than knowing that exit 8 is immediately after exit 7, which could be 1/4 mile past it or 40 miles past it.