I’m not sure why, but one day while returning home from the Swartz Bay ferry terminal I felt I had to count the number of road signs along the Pat Bay highway. I can’t explain it, I just did it — or at least I started to do it. After counting 130 of them and having not even made it to town yet, I gave up.
There’s too many signs out there. I suppose most of them are necessary, but do we need so many? We’ve obviously evolved into a distracting-sign-clutter culture.
But in accepting that, it seems logical to take the next step and establish a hall of fame for signs — the ones we can’t get out of our heads, no matter how hard we try.
Here are my nominations.
One of my all-time favourites came during a tour a few years ago of New York City — a magical place where clogged streets go beyond any normal human conception of congestion.
The sign was in downtown Manhattan, perhaps the epicentre of all bottlenecks. It read: “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here.” Succinct, to the point, and definitely New Yorker style.
We discovered another gem during a holiday trip on the incredible Gaspé peninsula in Quebec. Just over halfway between the St. Lawrence River and Lake Temiscouata is the hamlet of Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha! At first we doubted it was a genuine government road sign, but a few kilometres later, there it was — population 1,318.
Once, while driving through the seemingly endless desert between Phoenix and Flagstaff, Arizona, a few years ago, we saw a cluster of deliberately nondescript buildings off to the left. This is Area 51 territory, so our curiosity was definitely piqued.
But the next sign managed to clear things up for us: “U.S. Federal Prison — Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers!” Understood — driving on.
I enjoy irony, so I have to include the now famous sign on the A128 in Essex, Endland, which directs you to: “Brentwood,” “Chipping Ongar,” “Industrial Estates” and “Secret Nuclear Bunker.”
This secret, however, is long out of the bag, as that area now annually hosts the “Nuclear Rush Weekend” — a world-famous atomic-level obstacle course featuring the “deathslide,” “para-plunge zip lines” and “swing-a-ding” obstacles. Sounds painful, but hurry if you’re interested — the next race weekend is May 14-15.
In the Ubud forest in Bali, a road sign reads: “Caution Monkey Crossing. Take Care of Your Stuff.” That doesn’t make much sense until you check out some of the YouTube videos showing troops of well organized Macaques ripping off everything they can grab, including sandals, sunglasses and even cellphones, from passing tourists.
A road in Taichung, Taiwan, was in such bad repair and obviously beyond the current fix-up budget, so they settled on a cheaper warning-sign solution: “Bad Road. Fasten Safety Belts, Remove Dentures and Hearing Aids.”
Drive around enough in Athens, Georgia, and you might come to the corner of East Campus Road and Cemetery Street. Attached to the pole below the latter is a warning sign reading: “Dead End.”
A tour of Muskogee, Oklahoma, can take one to the Honor Heights Park neighbourhood, where you’ll find the corner of “Strange” and “Unusual.” One social media post about it says: “I enjoy spending time at this intersection. Great group of people.”
I have to include a commercial sign from Martin Luther King Boulevard in Augusta, Georgia, enticing passing hungry motorists to turn in and enjoy: “Human Hair. Chicken Wings.” Colonel Sanders disavows any knowledge.
A good example of the dangers of workplace distraction also comes from an undisclosed location in the southeastern U.S., where a municipal sign-shop-worker’s head was definitely somewhere else when making a standard yellow and black warning sign reading: “Please Slow Drively.”
In Beijing, we see the folly in spending good money for a warning sign, but then chintzing out by not going beyond its literal English translation — the result: “Speaking Cellphone Is Strictly Prohibited When Thunderstorm.” Also makes you wonder about the size of cellphone antennas there.
Finally, I’m sure railroad buffs will totally get this, but for the rest of us, there are some signs that defy comprehension, like this one in Kalama, Washington: “Caution Hy-Rail Vehicles Lift Frog.”
Glove Box: Last week, a reader expressed some serious safety concerns about the quietness of electric vehicles. Electric-powered cars emit virtually no sound, especially at low speeds, in comparison with their internal-combustion counterparts. The good news is that the feds, who regulate vehicle standards in Canada, are on it. Effective next year, all hybrid and electric vehicles must be equipped with an Acoustic Vehicle Alert System (sound emitters) that produces noise at low speeds.
