Roads - signage

In the UK, they tend to follow European standards for road signage. They rely on symbols rather than words to convey many of the messages. This makes a lot of sense because many drivers on UK roads would be from Europe. However, they can be confusing for Australian drivers.

The signs tend to be small - sometimes very small - and so they can be hard to see. For example, our speed limit signs are easy to see because they are on a large rectangular sign with a white background whereas the UK and Europeans go for a small circular sign.

For some signs about parking restrictions, you need to park your car, get out and walk up really close to the sign to find out whether you can park there.

Some signs have multiple messages on the same sign. It's hard to read the various messages as you drive by. In some cases, they include the word "End" in these multi-message signs and you are not sure whether the symbol above is ending or the symbol below.

As you might expect, all the signs in England that contain words (such as destination signs) are written in English. In Wales and Scotland, some signs are also written in the local language.

The Welsh have been trying to promote their language in various ways including road signs. However, the signs are hard to read because they list the Welsh version first and then the English version. By the time you have tried to read the Welsh version, you might have gone past it and so you might have missed the English version.

In Scotland, they only seem to use the Scottish text for destination signs (rather that instructional and advisory signs). Furthermore, they put the Scottish text in a different colour from the English text so that it is easy to distinguish and read.

When you leave a town, the speed limit sign will usually be a de-restricted sign (a circle with a diagonal slash) like we used to have in Australia. It seemed strange to us that there were also warning signs about speed cameras in these zones. Why would they have speed cameras if there was no speed limit?

We asked Avis this question when we returned the car. They told us there is a blanket speed limit of 70mph in these zones. Which raised the question: why don't they put up 70mph signs instead of the de-restricted signs? There were a lot of cars that passed us doing much higher speeds than 70mph.