Driving back to school, I hit one of those road signs I hate to see while in Maryland. Not “Road Work Ahead”. Not “School Zone”. No, it was the dreaded “No Merge Room”. The sign that makes you fear for your life because you have no idea how the merge will look until you’re almost out of room.
So, what other road signs do you hate to see?
Well, “Detour” is never a favorite.
“Next rest area 275 miles” :eek:
Dragon Crossing
uh-oh.
“Be prepared to stop” always churns my stomach. The last thing I want to do is sit in a line of backed up traffic for God-knows-how-long.
:“Road construction next xx miles.” If there are two digits in the mileage it makes me wish I could have taken a different route.
“Watch for falling rock”. In other words, if a boulder is tumbling down the hill and I just happen to be in its path I’m pretty much fucked. 
“Speed patrolled by aircraft.” Not once have I ever seen those damn planes that purport to be watching us speed demons down below.
“No services next xx miles.” While I’m not stupid enough to pass such a sign without making sure I have enough gas first, I shudder to think of how much it suck to have a breakdown in such areas.
Correction: I shudder to think of how much it would suck to have a breakdown in such areas. :smack:
Scariest sign I ever saw was the “Curves ahead” sign, with the ominous statement “Next 81 miles” underneath it. That was on one, south of Carmel in Cali. They meant it, too. By the end, I wanted dramamine.
Oh, and about the detour signs mentioned by Laughing Lagomorph, here, in and around Boston, it isn’t too terribly uncommon for them to put up a sign that gets you down some back road in a town that is ten miles from where I grew up, but have never actually been to, and then never have another sign about where to go. At that point, you put your faith in the person ahead of you and their ability to get back to a highway, any highway. Those detours are really fun at one in the morning when coming home from Boston. Freaking route three construction, won’t be finished until I graduated and move, but I digress.
Congestion Ahead
Be Prepared to Stop
It’s there permanently, at all hours of day, and it’s not one of those “but we’re working on it, so it will improve” kind of construction signs. Nooooo…
I hate that thing. It’s on a stretch of highway that suddenly starts spawning traffic lights. Traffic backs up like nobody’s business…
UGH.
(For twin cities people, yeah, I’m talkin’ 169S from 494 onwards…)
Speed limit 75 You know that everyone will be going 85/90 MPH. Anyone who has ever taken a trip on any stretch of I 95 in the south knows what I mean.
I-695 has a bill electronic billboard at about the nine o’clock mark. It used to be used to say things like
Accident at exit 15a
Proceed with Caution
or
Congestion Ahead
Be Prepared to Stop
The rest of the time it said nothing, or sometimes a feeble “Stay Alert.”
Now, whenever there’re no accidents or traffic snarls to report, it says,
Report Suspicious
Activity
(800 number)
It creeps me right the hell out.
“Major delays, M62 junctions 21-27”. Anyone who knows the road will understand.
There are road signs past Duluth, MN on US 61 (beautiful drive that follows the North Shore of Lake Superior) that say “NO JACK BRAKING”. They would drive me crazy because I always meant to look up the term but never remembered to when I got home. So when I saw the sign again, I’d :smack: and that went on for a couple years. I finally got around to looking it up while typing this post.
And…?
Oh sure, after my years of torment I’d just give up a secret like that?!?!
Moohoohahaha.
Anyways… apparently it’s also called “jake braking” which is a way diesel semi trucks use to slow down (esp. on hills) and this saves on brake life. The downside of this is a really loud noise coming from the braking.
And he learned it was nothing to be concerned about if you don’t drive a big rig?
It’s not just the detours, though, getting off the highway can be just like that. Not long after I started driving my old car I learned not to trust the gas gage when I ran out of gas on 495 about 30 miles from home (at that point I lived in Taunton) outside Milton, maybe? The town began with an “M” at any rate. After the nice tow guy brought me a couple gallons of gas, I got off on the next exit and went to a gas station that was right off of it. Then I tried to find an onramp. I drove 5 miles one way, and five the other. No onramp. No signs indicating where you got back on the highway…We’d only lived in the area a few months, and it was less than two years after I got my license, so I was really confused as to what I should do and didn’t really want to call home if I could avoid it since it was after 11. Eventually I realized that my mom had driven my brother and I to through this town once on the way to the cape a few months earlier. Through blind luck I managed to turn at all the appropriate places along the dark backroads and get home. I never did see a sign for the highway, though. Don’t you love driving in MA? My least favorite signs to see are the invisible ones!
I saw a sign is South Carolina that said something to the effect of “30 days in jail for speeding in a construction zone”.
West Coast white boy don’t wanna spend time indoors in the south for speeding. It certainly got my attention, and I wasn’t even driving!
I also hate “No Passing” signs, but I completely ignore them.
STOP
Fucking bastards, always tellin’ me what to do…
In the town of Malone, NY, they apparantly don’t understand the proper use of ‘lane merge’ signs. Your typical lane merge sign looks like this:
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or this:
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Indicating that one lane is merging into the other. Their signs, on the other hand, look like this:
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…? Excuse me? So, both lanes merge into, what, nothing? When I first saw this I thought to myself,
“OK…so two lanes become…no lanes? Great, now the road is gone! I’m screwed!”
Most places, the third sign marks “end of divided highway” – but only a few people in Malone know what a divided highway is!
(Wonderful town – it’s at least 100 miles from anywhere! We did a water project for them – the Industrial Park (which consisted entirely of a “sheltered workshop” run by the county ARC when we were working on the project, though they were hoping to get a Coke bottling franchise to locate there).