A rant about street signage.

[randomness]

I've been to a few places in the last year or so. Before that, I spent a lot of time in eastern Massachusetts.

One of the distinguishing features of eastern Massachusetts, and to a lesser degree, of New England in general, is that the road signage is scandalously bad. Possibly it is deliberately bad. One can hardly have signage that bad without trying.

Consider that many of the travelers I met complained about how bad road signage was in South Africa. These travelers tended to be from Europe or Australasia. I understood why they complained, because signage in South Africa was clearly not as good as, say, the UK or the Netherlands.

On the other hand, I found it quite acceptable. South Africa is a country where getting lost can have some dire consequences. I only got lost twice in about 3,000 kilometers: once in Pretoria, where the sign indicating the numbered route was the classic "confirmatory sign" (i.e., after the turn), so I had to make a U-turn to get back to the right road; and once while looking for one of the Boer War battlefields. The battlefield signs took me on a wild goose chase into a township. For all I know, the township had grown up on top of the battlefield. I exited quickly anyway, because there wasn't any battlefield to be found.

Even in Soweto, the signage was just fine. With a greater Johannesburg street atlas open on the passenger seat next to me, I was easily able to navigate without having to stop to figure out where I was. Soweto, btw, looks like any other poor neighborhood with single-story bungalows albeit with the occasional shack. (Well, at least Orlando East and Diepkloof do. I didn't do a long tour of Soweto by car, because I was on my way elsewhere.)

Compared to Phnom Penh, where every corner has clear white on blue signs for the streets that meet there, in both Khmer and English, greater Boston's signage is awful. And while one can claim that Phnom Penh's signage was probably paid for with outside aid, this is something one cannot claim for Brazil's signage.

In every Brazilian city I visited, not just Sao Paulo, Rio, and Brasilia, but places like Belo Horizonte and Goiania, not only were there street signs on nearly all corners, but these standard signs included the street name, the CEP (the Zip+4 equivalent), and the building numbers for that block. Brazil is not known for its high degree of public order, but I even saw these signs in some of the more established favelas. Sometimes, on major road junctions with sidestreets, they dispensed with the signs for the major road itself, but often they had the major road signed also. Navigating with a Sao Paulo street atlas was easy. Again, this is a place where getting lost can have serious consequences.

Even Bangkok has pretty decent street signage, again in Thai and English. There they sometimes fail to put up the sign for the major road, which can be annoying, but understandable when the minor street is a trok or a high-numbered soi, but generally major intersections have both streets signed. The lack of standard transliteration from Thai into English can be challenging, and the lack of any decent Bangkok street atlas is extremely annoying (note: business opportunity!).

Clearly this is a solvable problem, if even Cambodia can solve it. It would be nice if eastern Massachusetts bought a clue.

Comments

[amelia-g.livejournal.com]

I always assumed it was some sort of Social Register plot to keep riff raff who showed up after the Mayflower from being able to get around too easily.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I think there's actually something to this.

There's a definite sentiment of "if you're not from around here, and you don't have a native guide, what are you doing here?".

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

As a pedestrian, I would support any initiative that would result in fewer people asking me for directions ... and they ask just about every day.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

You should try living in Northern Virginia, where they carefully cultivate trees to grow directly in front of road signs on the secondary highways (such as Route 50). When I first moved there, there were signs I honest-to-goodness did not know existed until fall ended.

Although, driving around the People's Republic of Cambridge, I noticed the sign for Sherman Street is placed behind a telephone pole, so one can only see the sign from the least-travelled direction.

[totient]

Signage in Eastern MA seems to me to be optimized for those who are following rally directions. If the route you are trying to take includes a turn at a stop sign or tee intersection, there won't be a sign there. But why should there be? You're not going to miss a tee. On the other hand substantially every sideroad is marked (albeit not always in the obvious place). So it's pretty much always possible to describe a route, rural or urban, without having to refer to mileages.

The key aspect of rally, though, is that although you know where you are along the route you have no idea where you are geographically. So visitors are provided with just enough signage to get where they are going but none at all for sticking their nose where it doesn't belong.

...

If you think Boston is bad, try Fes, particularly Fes vielle, where as far as I could tell the roads didn't even have names.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

But why should there be? You're not going to miss a tee.

So, I guess if you're lost, and you're not actually in a rally, and you don't know which tee this one happens to be, you're SOL, yes?

If you think Boston is bad, try Fes, particularly Fes vielle, where as far as I could tell the roads didn't even have names.

Well, I did leave places like that out. Much of Japan, for example, has a convoluted building numbering system, by block reference, not by street--here too, many, if not most, streets have no names--and in order of date of construction. Kyoto has street numbers for major streets, which makes it a notable exception.

It all makes perfect sense, in a very Japanese kind of way. But not very good for navigation. Many Japanese business cards have little maps of the district on the back so you can find the place.

Gives the cops in the koban something to do, I suppose.

I understand the Koreans inherited this system from colonial days, but (patriotic pride being what it is) claim to have invented it. Personally, I'd disavow such a system, and eagerly blame someone else.

I'm also told that some Japanese are perplexed that every street has a name when they go overseas.

[a-dodecahedron.livejournal.com]

Houston streets have some neat features, almost as good as the way you've described Brazil: there are signs before major intersections that tell you what street you're coming up on, and a lot of overhead street signs tell you what the nearest address numbers are. Then again, there are an unholy number of intersections with one-way streets that are NOT marked "one way." Maybe the good signage is just there to lull us into complacency so they can kill us off with the bad signage.

[sarakate.livejournal.com]

Houston also has an ungodly number of streets which (a) feature a sudden 90-degree turn, so that they intersect streets to which they are parallel elsewhere, and (b) change names mysteriously and for no apparent reason (I offer up "Montrose-Studemont-Studewood" as an example). Sometimes, but not always, streets do both, but not necessarily at the same point along their length. I suspect this was engineered by a cabal funded by the publishers of those orange KEYMAP books.

[a-dodecahedron.livejournal.com]

Ha ha. Oh yeah. "Surprise! Now you're going THIS way!"

Then there are the streets with the gaps. You're looking for an address in the 2000s; you drive past 1300...1400...1500...dead end?!?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

"Again, this is a place where getting lost can have serious consequences."

Maybe that's why eastern MA doesn't bother.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. The signage in Roxbury and Dorchester isn't so great, either.

[bloodstones.livejournal.com]

I still think it would make sense to have places marked in and around Boston with signs that say "Don't drive through this area unless you live here and know where you're going". I grew up wandering around harvard square and I still have to think about how to drive through it.

[fin9901.livejournal.com]

Having grown up in Indiana and now living in Atlanta, I miss the good signage that Indiana has. It's dead simple to follow any US route or state road through Indiana; junctions are always marked clearly, and usually there's an advance set of signs to let you know which way you'll need to go at the intersection. The only real exception is Indianapolis, which has undergone this mystifying policy of expunging all US and state routes through the city, in favor of shunting them onto the interstate beltway, I-465, where as a general rule they're not signed at all where they're coincident with I-465. (Probably wise, because otherwise there'd be on average half a dozen of them at any given point.)

Atlanta, on the other hand, is very different. Non-interstate signage is half-hearted at best, and if you're not on US 41, there's a good chance you'll need a map to be sure you're staying on the road you think you're on. The street sign situation is even worse: *every* street going into downtown either ends somewhere in it, or changes name. And I don't even have to tell you about the 63 streets named some variant on Peachtree. Even better: many intersections, especially in suburban areas, have been redesigned for traffic flow, so streets will make turns at traffic lights for no discernable reason, or one street will change names because an intersection that looked like this: ---|__ got changed to: --\_|__ . And did I mention how different counties will use the same name for streets, so that you have to know whether something is in Fulton County or Cobb County to figure out where on which Roswell Road it's on?