The point is that your one photo doesn’t at all represent how hard or easy the signage on the New Jersey Turnpike makes it to find your destination. There will be a series of signs telling you several different things.
They are called “control cities” and they aren’t always the closest town. For example, in Los Angeles, northbound I-5 and I-405 both use Sacramento, which is nearly 400 miles away. On the east coast, I-95 north of Baltimore uses the control city of New York (even though Philadelphia is closer) and south of Richmond, VA uses Miami.
I would think that more backwards country would be like this!! Any industrialized country would know this is very bad not only for people driving that are trying to get some where:p:p but the police, fire and EMS.
If you hit other car what do you say to 911? I can’t tell you where or what street I’m on there is no name or number.
In the US at least, this sometimes leads to tiny towns becoming absurdly prominent, well-known locations, simply because they happen to be where two interstate highways intersect. For example, Albert Lea, Minnesota is a rural village in the middle of nowhere, but because two important interstates happen to cross there, it serves as a “control city” for signage, and a stranger passing through the region might assume it’s a big city.
This is analogous to subway (metro) systems in many cities. Typically, each “line” is given a number or a color, or both. The platform for the DIRECTION of the trains is often marked by the last station stop in that direction. Often, this is located at (and named for) some small, unimportant neighborhood or town near the edge of the city…but it looms large in the “mental map” of area residents, because of the metro signage.
bolding is mine.
They say, “Can’t you tell where I’m at? I’ve seen how it works on tv. You suck at your job.”
[What the 911 operator is thinking]
In reality, NO, I can’t tell where you are because the needed funds to upgrade the 911 system were not approved in the last ballot referendum. Would have been useful now, eh?
What you’ve seen on tv is fiction. Made up. Not real. We do not have 24/7 access to a live satellite feed to be able to zoom in and find you.
We’re hiring. If it is so easy come and show us how it is done.
[/What the 911 operator is thinking]
[What the 911 operator actually says]
OK, then. Where were you coming from? Where were you going to? (Tries to figure out likely route)
What landmarks have you seen along your trip? Have you passed the (insert prominent business/landmark here such as Wal-Mart, McDonalds, the intersection with I-15, etc…)
What buildings do you see around you? Tell me any address numbers you see on those buildings.
(If at a residence) What is the license plate number of a car parked nearby? (Runs plates to look for address)
Is it safe for you to walk to the corner and read the road name off the sign?
[/What the 911 operator actually says]
:smack:
Your second scenario is the fictional one. I once accidentally butt dialed 911 and they knew what building I was having lunch in. That was at least five years ago.
What did impress me about road signs in France was that all city and town streets were clearly labeled (once you learned they were on the side of the building and not on poles). Here they often will only label cross streets so you don’t have any indication of the name of the street you’re on.
It’s a rather common mistake in South Korea to say that the road don’t have names; they do. The highways are numbered and they even use the US interstate symbol for them. For other roads, you’ll see the name sign hanging over the intersections. Just before intersections, you’ll see a directory sign with either the road names or a major destination along the cross roads. Another place to see the name of the road is on the buildings along the road–there will be a placard with the house number on top and the road name on bottom.
“911” is thousands of separate agencies across the country and not all of them have the latest and greatest technology.
Underline mine. So much so that certain roads now form routes called E-number where the “E” stands for “european route”. Sometimes you see signs that identify a road as several letter-numbers combos, where one is an E and the other one is the “old” identifier. For example, AP-68 (the tollway between Saragossa and Bilbao) is also codified as E-804.
Spanish roads may have km markers or not, whether they do and their exact specs vary by road type. You can see a drawing of the “new” types here, those are metal signs. The “old” type is those concrete things, also shown in some of the pictures, with the top painted of a color corresponding to the type of road.
Has anyone yet mentioned that most French “interstates” (autoroutes) also have a name, not just a number? For example, “du Midi” connects Paris with southeastern France, known as “le Midi” (“Noonland,” for its associations with warmth.)
Older American interstates do this, too – most states at least have a “[state name] Turnpike” or “[state name] Thruway.” A few of these in the East predate the interstate system, and were absorbed into it.
Well, strictly speaking, as with noticing the speed limit sign it’s supposed to be the driver’s responsibility to observe what road they got on at what last major crossing. As other posters in the thread have mentioned, most countries and subdivisions thereof DO identify their streets and roads in the manner appropriate to the specific location and how people there get their bearings and DO post the corresponding signage at least at strategic points.
That the daily drivers will prefer to refer to a road as “old 65th” or “the Schlongingville road” even when it has a new street name in each county it crosses plus a proper State Route number and no longer ends at Schlongingville , does not mean the Roads and Transport Department simply allows anarchy. It means people prefer a familiar easy-to-understand way of giving directions even if it’s not the “official” one and the responders had better be familiar with it, too.
Correction: The autoroute connecting Paris with SE France goes by the even sunnier moniker “du Soleil.” The Autoroute du Midi is an east-west highway in southwestern France.
Alas I work as a supervisor in a 911 center that does not have location information about cell phone calls (called phase 1 or phase 2 wireless, in industry lingo). It’s real. Very real. You butt dial us and I see your number and maybe your name if your cell carrier transmits that data. I don’t get a location.
All 911 centers are not equipped the same. NENA the National Emergency Number Association, statesthat as of December 2015 “98.8% of Population have some Phase I” coverage. That leaves more than 3.8 million people in the US being served by 911 centers with no location detection ability for wireless 911 calls. (I work in such a center, though my office is in a foreign country.)
911 is one of the primary reasons why there is an urgency among officials to be sure each road has a name and that the building numbering is organized. Still one 911 center might answer calls for multiple small towns across a county and each town has a Main St. So verifying a full address can be very important. Don’t want the ambulance to go to one place when the emergency is somewhere else.
Have you ever listen to youtube clips of calls or online scanner apps of calls? Where the police and fire are having hard time finding the address.
Older cell phones had no GPS in them. And even newer cell phones give close address being you close to 1950 Main street. You could be at 1949 Main street or at 1951 Main street so on. Yes off my some numbers.
Good luck finding you in a high rise building!! A new GPS cell phone will not tell dispatch you on 27 floor in room xxx.
New vehicles have GPS but older vehicles do not.
Tell him to listen to some youtube clips of calls ( not even that old) of suicidal person or robbery suspect that stolen a cell phone so on.:eek::eek: And 911 dispatch and the police are having hard time finding the person!! The police dispatcher calling the cell phone provider and the cell phone provider pinging the cell tower to later call back over the police radio he or she is in one mile area of xx and xx cell tower site.
Well 10 cop cars are searching a one mile area!!! Good luck if he is moving is almost impossible to find.
This was in the days before cell phone had GPS. But not all people have new cell phones with built in GPS.
Towns, small cities and the country not going have state of art dispatch communications like big cities.
There even some towns and country in south where police don’t even have computers or MDT in their car.
It might be worth noting that many, many roads in the US did not have names until the 1990s. The growth of Enhanced 911 persuaded rural counties that they needed to switch to city-style addressing, with house numbers and road names, instead of the previous system of Rural Route 3, Box 409B, Bugtussle, Texas.
When mapping cities in the US, I still occasionally find streets with no names, but they tend to be short connectors with no one living on them, or other special situations like Indian reservations, mobile home parks, or housing projects.
Before smart phones, you gave them the Melway (map) reference. It was being rationalised just about the time we came here (1970), abut there are still roads that change name at the bourndries, and roads (High Street, Brunswick / Coburg ) where the name stays the same, but numbering starts over at the boundry. And some of those street names are duplicated all over the city (Station Street? High Street? ) My Dad’s theory was that the reason Melbourne had such an excelent city map company, was that you couldn’t find anything without the map. Of course /I/ could know what street I’m on – it’s just that without the map, the emergency services couldn’t tell what street that meant I was on.
Our routes (1…000 etc) are numbered seperately from the road names, and signed independantly.
When I was young, roads were marked by mileposts. Using the old Roman design, and quite distictive. Now the highways are sign posted much better than they were then (in 1971 we got lost on the main highway from Brisbane to Sydney), but the km posts are hardly noticable if they exist at all.
When we were in PNG in the late 60’s, the roads didn’t even have mileposts. But in PNG at that time, if you were on a road, you knew which road it was.
PS: apart from PNG, I’ve never met a road with no name. The farm roads all had names: the road out to Smith’s place is Smith’s Lane, the road out to <village> is <village> road.
Israeli highways all have numbers (odd numbers are east-west, even numbers north-south - the opposite of the U.S, I believe) and usually also note the city where they end up. However, may roads, or segments of roads, also have names, and many of those names aren’t listed anywhere; you just have to know them. For instance, Route 2 is called “the Coastal Road”, Route 4 is “Geha” until it turns into the “Old Road” north of Tel Aviv, and Route 20 is “the Ayalon”. There’s also “the Rift Road”, “the Ruler Road” (which is in fact very straight) and “the Tunnels Road”, among many others.
Many streets in Arab towns don’t have names, but they’ve all been assigned numbers by the government for convenience.
It will have been designated with an A number (if an “autoroute” = motorway), or N or D (National or Departmental roadway), and will appear as such on maps (perhaps it’s more commonly assumed people are still using maps to navigate with?). Also, distances between towns and villages are quite likely shorter, so it’s not difficult to identify a location, even if (as on the autoroutes) there aren’t emergency phones with location/identification information.
Here’s a French website with information on their direction signs:
http://www.passetoncode.fr/panneaux-de-signalisation/panneaux/direction/#top
In the UK there’s been a fair amount of “design science” in the development of a logic/language for road signage, though I suppose over the years inconsistences have crept in: