This weekend, my girlfriend and I took my mother to Washington, DC. I’ve driven in Virginia before, but it’s been a long time and I was traveling for work so it was airport-to-destination-to-hotel-to-airport and I didn’t really pay attention to much other than that.
This time, though, I noticed that when the road takes you from one county to another, you are commanded to make that transition. It’s not an informative “Entering Cabarrus County/Leaving Mecklenburg County” like it is in North Carolina, but “Enter Surry County/Leave Prince George County” which seems unnecessarily demanding to a newcomer like me.
It reminded me of my first long driving trip, the day after I graduated from high school, when I discovered while driving south on I-95 toward Florida that Georgia did not then (I believe it’s changed since) number their exits by the closest mile marker like North and South Carolina did, but rather consecutively.
So, what little things like this strike you when you’re traveling?
The two things that struck me the most about US road signs were 1) how wordy they were and b) the use of fractions in distances.
Wordiness is part of a continuum; for most North Anerican style warning signs there is a choice of a symbol or a word, and the US tends more often to choose the word where Ontario tends to choose the symbol.
But the fractions are sharply different than Ontarian usage. A series of US signs might say, “2 miles”, “1 mile”, “1/2 mile”, “1/4 mile”. Equivalent Ontarian signs would say, “2 km”, “1 km”, “500 m”, “250 m”. The fractions stand out more to me than the use of non-metric, especially because I think I’ve seen the use of things like “500 feet”.
That’s not to say that Canadian signs are uniform. Quebec road signs, in particular, are quite different than Ontarian signs, even while they stay within the same broad North American style.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike had exits numbered that way until a few years ago. I believe it caused a bit of a flap locally when the exits were given mileage-based numbers.
Zimbabwe had a few oddities. Driving around Harare, I’d see signs saying “Robot Ahead”. Turns out robot is the local term for a traffic light.
At the south end of the Vic Falls highway/rail bridge from Zambia, the official border sign says: “Wellcome to Zimbabwe”.
The first time I ever went to Missouri on business I was headed to Washington Missouri. I flew into Lambert, rented a car and found my way to I-44 West.
I encounter roads like Route W?? WTF? “W” for Washington? or West? Some county roads in Missouri have strictly Alpha names and no numeric character.I had traveled extensively in the east and southeast and never saw letters as County Roads.
In French Guiana, I had my first exposure to traffic circles on a regular basis.
The odd duck is the “french” T-intersection*. On long 2-lane straightaways, a left turn was accomplish with a right side deceleration lane that would then curve around to the left to directly opposite of the left-hand branch. After briefly stopping at the red, octagonal “ARRET” sign, looking both ways, you would then cross to the other side. Naturally, there is no equivalent deceleration lane for the opposing traffic should they want to turn right at the T.
I’ll presume that this idea is to reduce the chance of an accident affecting both lanes.
When traveling outside the Baikonur Cosmodrome limits, all the stop signs were spelled in Cyrillic as “CTOП”, but once you were inside the base the spelling change to Roman letters: “STOP”. I learned later from a Russian who claimed to know that this was required by international law. Which seem rather Orwellian as no foreigners were allowed to drive on base.
In Russia, this makes perfect sense.
*Probably isn’t really a French invention, but it sounds more exotic does it not, mousier?
I am currently divorcing and the place I am moving from is a rental I shared with my soon to be ex in Spotsylvania and every time I see this thread I think
When driving up from Texas to Illinois, around Oklahoma, we encountered signs that said, IIRC, “Don’t Drive into Smoke” - the implication being that you might be driving towards a fire hazard. Okay - good to know.
In rural Illinois, there are Burma Shave-type signs advocated gun ownership. I don’t remember the actual rhymes but they are along the lines of “The robber thought he’d get you, but you had a gun and you showed him - praise God!” Totally surreal to drive past the 4 - 5 signs completing the rhyme and realize I am not on the coast anymore.
That reminds me of the bullet-scarred signs I saw when we were driving through eastern Montana. They said, “You are in Montana cattlemen’s country. Eat beef.” It was not a request. It was a command.
There’s an '80s folks song by John Forster about a guy driving through Massachusetts who has a chuckle driving into the town of Marion and sees the sign saying “Entering Marion”. He gets more and more giddy as he enters, Beverly, Sharon and sundry others. By the time he gets to Lawrence, he’s out of control and does the same for Lowell, Norton and Quincy.
Wisconsin’s road naming scheme is similarly bollocksed-up. Not only do they have lettered highways, but they have so many that they ran out of letters and had to institute a double-letter policy (so like Highway X, Y, Z, AA, AB, etc). At that point, just give names to your freaking roads, Cheeseheads*!
*I love cheese, and I like Wisconsin well enough, but I *don’t *love your nomenclature.
On one road that passes through the village of Esmond RI there are signs that say “Now entering Esmond” and “Now leaving Esmond” only about 100 yards apart. It’s almost like the old joke where it would say “Now entering Esmond” on both sides of the sign.
Some Virginia county border signs say (or at least used to say), “End Whatsit County” — which sounds like the slogan of a strange grass-roots political campaign.
End the county?? And replace it with what, exactly?
Virginia also has “Certified Business Locations” according to their road signs, which makes me wonder if other towns, lacking that certification, are without any businesses.
And to continue picking on Virginia, they have signs saying “Speed Limit Enforced by Aircraft” — which for whatever reason leads me to imagine Messerschmidt fighter planes diving in from above, assaulting speeding traffic with machine gun fire.
federal and state highways are numbered. county highways may be designated by letters, counties may coordinate and use the same letter if the road continues past county boundaries.
I’ve noticed a few small towns in Massachusetts have signs right outside the business district saying “THICKLY SETTLED.” That’s oddly fussy for a sign, and anyway I’m sure most people notice the subtle difference between farmland and numerous buildings 10 feet from the road without the sign.
Letters for highways is rare in my experience – almost every state uses numbers for county roads. New York uses a combination of numbers and letters for some state roads (near where I live are 9W, 9G, and 9H).
