UK/US Differences #1 - Road Signs

I moved to the US in the summer of 2004 - almost five years ago. And while the UK and the US are close cultural cousins, there are still enough differences to make me chuckle.

What, for example, is with all the "STOP" signs over here? Especially since you're supposed to come to a complete STOP at them. In the UK, those are rare. In most cases, they use the UK equivalent of a "YIELD" - they call it a "Give Way" sign. And guess what; there aren't piles of car wrecks (they call them "crashes") at every corner. In fact, road safety seems (I don't know what the stats are) much worse in the US. I don't think I had ever seen a car on its roof before I came here. Now I've seen several. I think part of the problem is the fact that here you have high speed (50mph+) roads with no central median (called a central reservation" over there). As a result, it's not difficult to get wrecks at combined speeds of well over 100mph.

Another road signage difference is the way off ramps (UK "exit lanes") are marked. In the US, it's common for the inside lane to simply become the off ramp. As a result,if you do nothing you leave the highway or freeway (UK "motorway"), and you have to take an action if you want to stay on. In the UK it's usually the opposite. You have to decide to change to the off ramp. If you stay where you are, you stay on the highway.

The message conveyed by the position of the exit sign is different too. And that applies to all overhead freeway signs. In the UK, an overhead motorway sign applies to the lane below if all or part of is above the lane. And, most important, if the sign does not touch your lane at all, the lane specifically does *not* go to where the sign says. In the US it's more fuzzy. Usually the yellow "Must Exit" sign applies only if it *completely* covers the lane in question. If it only half covers, the lane probably allows you to exit, but it doesn't force you. But I know of at least one exception to that in Austin. And then for general directional overhead signs, just because your lane is not covered by a sign does not mean the sign doesn't apply to you. It can all be a bit confusing.

On road signs then, I think the UK has the edge.
UK 1, USA 0

Comments

[Gordon McGregor]

but to be fair, you have to factor in roundabouts, which the UK uses in place of the US 4-way stop sign.

If you are keeping score, I think the US wins one point for not having this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Roundabout_(Swindon)

[Tommy]

I was going to mention that, because I do think all-way stops are superior to *small* roundabouts. However, for large junctions, I think it's evens. And then what about a four-way junction, where one of the roads has a priority? You can't tell, if you're at one of the other three, that the fourth has right of way. There's one near where I live. It's a clear bug in the traffic control system.

[Paul Marriott]

4-way stops are inefficient and damaging to the environment since they force a car into its least efficient mode: starting from a dead stop. They're also un-necessary unless the traffic volume is high - in which case a properly controlled junction with lights (with appropriate volume sensors) is always better. A roundabout is equivalent to a four-way junction with give-ways at each entrance, not a 4-way stop anyway.

Your example of a four-way junction with unequal priority is an example of poor design - unless there are signposts to illustrate which of the junctions are stops and which are give-ways.

The nice thing about the UK traffic sign system is that it is consistent - the US and Canada have inconsistent systems where signs differ from place to place and light signals have completely different meanings depending which state/province you're in. Broken by design!

[Grant Martin]

A most interesting article from The Atlantic magazine last summer (july-august 2008) "Distracting Miss Daisy" by John Staddon, about the differences between signage and road rules of various kinds - between the US and (mainly) the UK: see http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/traffic

Roundabouts are in my experience superior to 4 way stops (which driving around Pleasanton with several I use every day - and many of the drivers can't even remember the simplest rules such as yielding to the driver that gets there first!) - except when they grow into monsters with lights due to high traffic volume such as the Magic Roundabout.

Experience on the (always awful) California motorways has indicated also the virtues of custom designed motorways to ones that were just upgrades of more minor roads and gradually became converted to Motorways in fits and starts. That is one reason you get so many (way too many) entrances and exits on many California motorways - because they essentially are overgrown regional roads. Having entrances and exits with gaps of as little as 1/4 to 1/2 mile, plus having ordinary lanes suddenly become exit only lanes (because there wasn't enough room to consistently have the same number of lanes for a long distance) seems often to be a sign that this used to be a regional type road that became a motorway more by accident than by design.