Letters and symbols

Now that I get to be homemaker for a few months, I find myself on the road at times when I would otherwise be at work. And now that my mind is not distracted by worries about failing students, data that just does not seem to make sense, and other trivial concerns like if husband dear would remember to pick my suit up from the dry cleaner’s, I suddenly have a lot more time to ponder my surroundings. And you know what has been bothering me on my recent errand-missions? The traffic signs. Yep, some American traffic signs really get on my nerves.

Like what’s up with the school zone signs that write the hours on which you have to observe the slower speed limit in tiny itsy-bitsy letters? If the safety of school children is that important, don’t you think they could have splurged on a slightly bigger sign where the driver doesn’t need reading glasses to make out the times when students will be near the road? Don’t get me wrong, I think school zones are a wonderful idea. Kids can be really unpredictable, and it’s great to know when to expect little darlings to run across a four-lane road right in front of your car. But why do some school districts have to make it so hard to figure out when to slow down? I can’t count the number of times I have misread a sign, slowed down, only to lose about ten years off my life when the semi behind me would honk its horn at me.
On the way to work, I drive through two school zones. One uses the tiny-writing signs. After ten months, I’ve figured out what the sign says, but for the first few months, I had a hard time remembering the afternoon times (2:15 – 3:50 is apparently not a logical time for me). I would always squint and try to read the sign when I passed it, but nine times out of ten, I would only catch the beginning or the ending time, and neither would be very helpful. Usually I would just adapt to what other drivers were doing, but since I’m one of those crazy people who just has to know, it was enough to annoy me. The second school zone I drive through has the flashing light system; if you need to slow down, a set of lights placed over the road will flash yellow. This works great, not in the least because it means that you don’t have to memorize the school calendar of each school district you drive through to know when schools are not in session and you’re merely holding up traffic. Unfortunately, none of the school zones in this county use the flashing lights. So just today, when I was running errands around two, I found myself squinting and slamming on the brakes twice. And no, I don’t need glasses.

And what about those signs that say “Caution. Low or soft shoulder”? Every time I see one of those I want to yell (and yes, sometimes I actually do): “Make up your mind!”. I mean, not to step on shoulders’ toes, but honestly, how many shoulders are both? We have a sign like that a few blocks over, and the shoulder there is not soft, it’s low. If you run off the road, you end up in a ditch. Not good, no. But then why can’t they just put up a sign that reads “Caution. Low shoulder”? Is the county trying to save us money by printing one kind of sign instead of two? It’s a mystery.

I also like the signs that read “Caution. Bridge may ice in winter”. First of all, I can’t imagine it ever freezing hard enough in middle or southern Georgia that drivers would actually spin out of control. I drove through southern German snow and black ice more times than I care to remember, trust me, I know. But, I’m willing to be magnanimous and give the traffic sign people the benefit of the doubt there. My second concern is regarding the fact that a) these signs are, again, tiny, and b) placed maybe 100 ft before the bridge in question. By the time you have figured out what the sign means, if you ever do, you could, at least according to the Georgia state government, be in a death-defying tailspin.

On a more serious note, when I first started driving in the US, one of the things that I noticed right away was the lack of symbols. European signs don’t use a lot of writing, while American signs do (“Caution. Children at play” instead of a picture of a child running, “Slow down. Road work ahead” instead of a sign of a construction worker). I always wondered how this worked for the millions of illiterate Americans. Or people whose command of English is not sufficient for them to understand a sign in a few seconds. If there is one thing I could change about driving here, it wouldn’t be the lack of roundabouts, or the speed limits, it would truly be the road signs. And not just because they annoy little old me from time to time, but because it’s about something more than that.