Road safety signs

Road safety signs certainly have their amusing side, although the message they are supposed to portray is intended to keep the roads safe for all – including the new road safety signs that have been appearing recently in Romania: ‘Warning! Drunks on the Road’. Meanwhile, in Trevisco, northern Italy, motorists are being advised to ‘Watch out for Prostitutes!’: the road safety signs do not, however, explain why! Conversely, too many road safety signs sprouting up on UK roads are considered to be just as much of a hazard as too many.

At the end of 2007 a council in South Wales, UK deciding to carry out a ‘de-clutter audit’, the result of which was that as many as 1,000 road safety signs were removed from the local area as they were deemed ‘too confusing’ due to the sheer quantity of information drivers were being expected to assimilate as they drove past. The thinking behind this, according to the RAC, was that, whilst drivers’ attention was focused on clusters of road safety signs, their attention was not fully on the road ahead of them.

Do Road Safety Signs Need Updating?
In the UK our current crop of road safety signs herald from that era of the motorcar when driving along Britain’s roads was still a leisurely pleasure. The Preston bypass was the first section of any motorway to be built in the UK, in 1958, followed a year later by the opening of the M1. It was the advent of these motorways that saw the introduction of the first road safety signs and, those self-same designs are still being used today. The design for our road safety signs was produced by Jock Kinnear and Margaret Calvert in 1957, considered quite avant-garde for many tastes in those days. This is possibly why these road safety signs seem to be so contemporary today.

Following their success with road safety signs that they designed for the new motorways, this design team worked out a series of road safety signs suitable for use on all the ‘A’ class roads, using pictograms that they designed specifically to convey instant meaning. So successful were these designs that they were adopted by other countries and eventually became incorporated amidst a universal road safety sign system that is recognized the world over. Clearly, part of the success of these original designs is due to their consistency wherein specific colours and shapes are used for various sets of elements, as well as clearly recognizable symbols and pictograms designed to be quickly and easily interpreted without too much thought needing to be put into what they each mean.

The Variety of Road Safety Signs
Indigo blue was originally considered for motorway road safety signs because the colour was considered to be relaxing, having a calming effect. The colour yellow, as well as amber, has always been associated with conveying something that could herald danger and this is used to good effect in road safety signs. Meanwhile, the points of a triangle are also considered to herald danger. This shows how very clever these road safety signs really are: the psychology behind the colours and shapes conveys the message by working with our natural psychological connotations so that the message each of these road safety signs is trying to impart is unequivocal, although there are individuals who, when interviewed, admit to not knowing what some road safety signs mean!


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