"Terry Harper" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 13:45:00 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
wrote:

Going back to the earlier theme of "let's mock the Americans' way of doing
things", another thing that I found when I drove over there was that their
standard of signposting, once you got off the multi-lane highways, was
abysmal. Maybe I'm just used to a three-way sign at the junction of almost
every country lane in England. And the road name signs are very difficult
to
read because they are in a very condensed font, in white letters on a pale
green background: signs are supposed to be legible! I can only comment on
Massachussetts roads: I don't know whether it's the same in all states. It
doesn't help that the road atlas that I had was organised by town (rather
than being a simple west-to-east, north-to-south arrangement) and the
various maps were at different scales and in different styles. And this
was
a map book that boasted on its front cover "highly acclaimed" and "very
easy
to use"!!!

Personally I find their street signs much better than we have here, in
that they appear at every road junction, with both streets and the
block numbers on them. Here it is unusual to find a street name at an
intermediate junction.


That's in built-up areas. I'm talking about out-of-town roads. Maybe it
varies from state to state, but I found that at junctions between what we'd
call a single-carriageway A or B road and an unclassified road, there were
almost never any direction signs (eg X miles to place Y). If you were lucky
there might be a road name sign, in white on pale green which (a) was
virtually invisible and (b) was bugger-all use unless you had a large-scale
map that showed road names. Signposting on highways and in cities is fine -
as long as you remember on highways that as soon as you pass an
advance-warning sign for a junction you need to move into Lane 2 to avoid
being shuttled off at the junction - in Massachusetts their entry and exit
slip roads are often part of the road (ie Lane 1) rather than being an
additional lane to the right of Lane 1 ;-) I only made that mistake once
and felt a REAL pillock!

Also, on main-road signs, they tend to signpost the compass direction that
the road ultimately goes in, rather than the direction at that point. If you
know from looking at the map that the road that you want to turn onto faces
roughly north, you'd tend to expect to take the "North" direction on the
sign. Occasionally I was caught out because the road has a couple of u-bends
in it and starts off going north but somewhere along its length (maybe many
miles away) turns south and ends up south of where you are now. If you want
somewhere north of where you are now, you'd expect always to take the road
signposted "North" but you actually want the one signposted "South" ;-)
There was a road on route between Newburyport (Mass) and Kennebunkport
(Maine) that did this - forget exactly where but I know we got hopelessly
lost and wasted a lot of time going in the opposite direction because of it.