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You know the signs I mean: the ones that list two or three cities and how far away you are from them. In the U.S., we call them "mileage signs." But since almost no one else uses miles, and "kilometerage" isn't a real word, I guess "distance sign" is the term that most of the world uses.
In any case, there's nothing particularly glamorous about them, but some places do them better than others. Here in the U.S., they're pretty non-descript, but they're functional and they get the job done.
In South Korea, they look similar, but they're bilingual, and they're mounted overhead for ease of viewing.
So far so good, but in Germany I'd say they do them better, because they list not only cities on the road you're on, but also major cities on intersecting highways as well. The only thing I don't like about them is that they list the cities in descending order of distance. I prefer the American way, listing cities in ascending order, so that the one listed first is the one you actually get to first. I also prefer the South Korean tendency to mount their distance signs overhead, instead of on the side of the road.
On the other hand, sometimes you get signs like the ones in Australia.
Good luck reading 7 lines of text as you zip past, never mind trying to figure out why some of them are enclosed in parentheses.
Or, "better" yet, this one, which I believe is in Croatia.
Or, to really top it off, there's this towering, hard-to-read sign in Morocco, with 11 destinations.
So, what say you? Which countries do you think produce particularly good distance signs? ("Good" meaning that they convey their information in an easy-to-read, easy-to-understand format.) Conversely, which ones do particularly poor ones?
Most used to the European style ones. It's not just Germany that does them in descending order though, not completely sure but I think all European countries do them this way.
The American one also gets the job done.
The Moroccan one is extremely poorly made, too small and too much information, the font size of the distances is too small, too much going on there.
Parentheses indicate that the location is on an intersecting highway or road.
Thank you for letting me know. I must say, I prefer the German way of showing this information, as illustrated in my initial post. Their way makes the distinction clearer and also shows the number of the intersecting highway as well as the name of the city.
To clarify my original post, the signs I showed are just a representative sample. If you know of other countries aside from the ones shown that do their distance signs particularly well, or poorly, please mention them too.
I would read that as saying "135 is greater than 28." Thanks for the math lesson, Old Stone Marker!
(Seriously, is there any other context anywhere near that sign that indicates what those numbers and arrows are showing? Because the sign itself, in isolation, is quite a bit less than helpful.)
A lot of countries signs will vary by location. That first Morocco sign is probably in some hinterland of Western Sahara. Morocco’s distance signs in the more developed areas look similar to those in Europe. They also use stone signs in some non developed areas.
I would read that as saying "135 is greater than 28." Thanks for the math lesson, Old Stone Marker!
(Seriously, is there any other context anywhere near that sign that indicates what those numbers and arrows are showing? Because the sign itself, in isolation, is quite a bit less than helpful.)
According to law, in 1649 a marker had to be put roughly every 2.5 kilometers. The arrows indicate the distance between two province capitals, so that one means 135 km to Helsinki and 28 km to Hämeenlinna. (Of course when the stone was put up, the metric system didn't exist, so originally the distances were in Scandinavian miles.)
Of course today those are obsolete and their function are only to be historical monuments.
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