We put up big directional signs designed to be read by people at speed and making people feel like they are on a motorway then wonder why have to put up other signs to remind them of the speed limit and that they aren’t on a motorway.
Photo is credited to oh.yes.melbourne
Processing...
The worst are the overhead signs on Nelson, Hobson and Fanshawe streets. Work against trying to transition drivers out of the motorway environment.
+1
Fanshawe Street and The Strand even go so far as to have the same tactile dots separating the lanes as you find on motorways. It’s blatantly a serious effort to keep motorists in motorway mode.
+2 – and they add to the feeling for other road users that you are on a motorway and shouldn’t be there.
As Tim Finn would say…..”time for a change”.
+3 Increases speed and desecrates a sense of place. Rip out the sense of place and human activity and people go even faster. Appropriate for motorways only. Lots of good work being done overseas about context sensitive signage.
Your photo is completely misleading and misrepresents the context and spacing between the signs.
The second sign is not that big, and for most road users is placed over a hump in the road, where people need to be able to see it at distance so they can change lanes safely at a pressure point on the road.
Given your relentless campaign for better signage and safety for cyclists, given these signs are intended to help with this (were implemented as part of the safety review of the intersection), you are being very unfair.
As a regular user of this road the signs are useful, clear, help reduce speed around a dangerous intersection (they flash slow down as soon as you are over 52 or so from quite a distance away) but also make sure people unfamiliar with the area, who are big users of this road, know what lane to get into and are not trying to change lanes in a dangerous place, and cause an accident, or worse hit a cyclist.
The whole environment along this stretch works against all the attempts to improve safety as it’s vast width leads drivers to increase their speed unthinkingly. I wonder if it was built this wide with the intention that it accommodate trams? Designed in the 1920s when motor traffic was virtually non-existent compared to now. Four lanes for traffic! So excessive when the space could accommodate separated cycle ways and a busway and could turn this roaring de facto motorway into the world’s greatest urban waterfront boulevard.
So clear and legible is bad, but small and difficult to read is good? You want everybody slowing down and squinting at the signs, causing nose to tail crashes and run-over pedestrians?
Road signs are big & easy to read for very good reason. They are safer.
I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why signs should be harder to read. I recall road signs were removed completely in southern England in 1940 in order to confuse Germans. Maybe we could do that in Auckland. Motorists would be forced to get out of their car and knock on a resident’s door to ask where they were and where they needed to go. That would really slow people down.
I drove down to Wellington over the new year break and was surprised how little signage there was for Auckland on the way back. I would have thought it was an obvious place that people wanted to visit and it would warrant a destination and distance somewhere just north of Wellington CBD. But the signs were for Palmy and places before Palmy. And then for Taupo. There still weren’t any signs for Auckland when I turned off SH1 just after Putaruru and headed towards the Coromandel. It was somewhere around Paeroa that I finally found a sign pointing the way to NZ’s largest city. By comparison, I’m pretty sure there are signs for London all around Scotland.
As a frequent visitor there. I know what you mean…
http://goo.gl/maps/23trf
I have always personally wondered why there were no Auckland or Napier on this particular one.
Given that both Sh1 and Sh 2 eventually go to Auckland both directions should have Auckland on them 🙂
In the case of the British motorway signage the reference is often “The North” or “The South” with, typically, the next large population centre’s name.
NZ’s signs generally direct you to the next major urban area. So from the Cape you get Whangarei, then Auckland, then Hamilton, the Taupo, then Palmy, then Wellington. Not sure why…
I think it’s probably just utilitarianism – the greatest good for the greatest number. Far more people at any particular spot are going to be making short trips, like Wellington to Palmy, than driving all the way to Auckland. Even if you are, you’re probably going to take a break, at least to gas up, and you can check the map at that point.
The other thing about having a sign to Auckland as you leave Wellington is that it’s only useful for people going all the way north to somewhere near Auckland. Far more people would be going only to Palmerston North, or more importantly, turning off somewhere along the way. If you’re going to Rotorua, say, you can easily get directions: follow the signs to Palmerston North first, then Taupo once you start seeing that, then Rotorua once you start seeing that. If the signs said “Auckland”, you’d have to do more work to figure out where to turn off, especially since there’s actually quite a lot of potential routes to get to Auckland!
I also wonder if NZTA isn’t hugely keen to encourage people who aren’t familiar with the route to try driving all the way from Wellington to Auckland in a single day.
Re: signs to Auckland,
It’s simple utilitarianism. Greatest good for the greatest number. How many people are driving all the way to Auckland, versus going to Palmerston North?
Plus, if you’re going to neither Palmy nor Auckland, the Palmerston signs are going to be more use to you as well, since you’ll probably have planned out a route based on turning off the main road at a big junction. If you’re going to Hastings, say, you can follow the signs to Palmerston and you won’t be completely messed up if you miss one. You know that you need to go past Palmerston, so if you need, you can just follow the signs until you get to Palmerston. It actually reduces how much geography you need to know to make the trip, since you can break the trip up into “get to Palmerston North, by following the signs” and only then “get to Hastings”.
Otherwise, you’d have to follow the signs to Auckland, and know that you have to turn off somewhere along the way. Miss just one sign, and you’re horribly lost. You could keep driving for hours without figuring it out.
I also wonder if NZTA aren’t that keen to encourage people who aren’t familiar with the route to try to drive from Wellington to Auckland in one day.
But at 50kmh, road signs don’t need to be as big as those illustrated. And if a driver slows down and someone behind runs into them then it is the fault of the following driver for following too close. Nothing to do with the sign.
Or maybe the car in front should have been wearing a fluro vest 🙂
Why aren’t all cars painted fluorescent. This would prevent all accidents where a driver fails to see another car. /s
Often wondered this myself. Train fronts are required to be yellow for visibility purposes. If roads could be made safer by insisting on something similar for raod vehicles, why do we not do it? Or are the whims and desires of motorists so much more important?
Same with personalised registration plates. Some years ago I recall seeing an article about some company or other which operated a small fleet of vehicles, each having plates personalised for the company. I don’t remember the details, but the gist is that a pair of vehicles displayed plates something like this:-
1 REGO I
I REGO 1
These plates would be very difficult to differentiate at a distance. So why is such pandering to vanity allowed to compromise such an important requirement of vehicle identification and by extension, road safety? If people want to display a personalised name they are perfectly free to signwrite it on the vehicle as many do. The rego plates should remain functional and unambiguous.
And perhaps vehicle colour should be likewise, at least for certain key areas of the vehicle.
Except, based on some recent examples, ATM’s, bars and houses will all need to be fluro as well, as drivers appear to be able to crash into them.
Bryce, go to the location, look at what is there, and you will see this photo is deceptive and misleading, or are you advocating that the next sign which also flashes and if included in this photo, but I suspect conveniently left out, would appear even bigger if taken in the same view.
Oh wait that one flashes and warns of oncoming cyclists so doesn’t count or help support this story.
If the road were truly designed for all modes then the bike warning sign would not be required.
Likewise, if drivers paid attention to their speedometers and stuck to the posted speed, the speed warning sign could be gone as well.
I heard from a reliable source that the flashing sign was actually installed to target the cyclists that continually speed along this section, most at over 50kph.
Lol.
very weak response Bryce and not answering the question
Neither was my question as to why the sign needed to be so big. And, i stand by my comment that if the road were designed for ALL modes, the warning sign wouldn’t be required. As a for the speed sign being there for bikes – details or source please.
Huh what is exactly the issue here with the directional sign post?
I thought nice and large would mean I could see it some distance back and change lanes then rather than right on top of the sign and too close to the intersection. Also what about our vision impaired (who can still drive) or senior citizens that still drive?
Mountain out of a molehill here
Vision impaired and driving? Think about that statement.
Weak response #2. and also childish
I was being serious. The driving test pretty much ensures this shouldn’t happen so it shouldn’t be an issue. If you cant read normal traffic signs, what chance you’re going to see a child? And I’m sure Ben will take my answer in the manner i meant.
Looking at the licencing law you can if cleared by the doctor drive with a vision impairment. Long Sightedness and short sightedness are vision impairments and people drive with them Bryce
Yep, I’m short sighted and am allowed to drive. But only with corrective eyewear. At which time my eyesight is perfect.
See here for what you can and can’t do:
http://nzta.govt.nz/resources/medical-aspects/6.html
That corrective treatment is the key point. I wonder how many people drive without their glasses? I know a guy who does it from time to time. 1,500kg or so of moving machinery needs care and attention.
Note also that the blue sign is in the middle of the footpath, pushing pedestrians into the so called cycle lane. Real mode hierarchy showing here.
http://goo.gl/maps/vlCc8
The ones on Hobson and Fanshawe are much worse, give a real motorway feel to those streets despite being in the middle of the CBD. Note the Hobson one is only 330m from Aotea Square, the supposed middle of town, but forget about anyone walking there.
“Note also that the blue sign is in the middle of the footpath, pushing pedestrians into the so called cycle lane. Real mode hierarchy showing here.”
The street lights and the trees are in the cycle lane pushing bikes in to the so called footpath. Time for Auckland Council to get busy with a chainsaw.
Signs all around Europe are generally superb. NZ’s traditionally aren’t. I’m glad that we’re trying to catch up with this excellent sign with its clear lettering in a modern font, its route numbering, and its German or Dutch-style blue background.
Most of the streetlights are at the edge and have been carefully placed, though some of them careless.
The council has had no problems removing any obstructions for cars whatsoever, and spent a large some of money doing this, but carelessly place obstacles in the paths of pedestrians and cyclists.
I don’t understand why traffic signs can be blue, green, yellow at random. Much better in Europe with green=motorway, blue=main road, white=local road, yellow=temporary. No exceptions
They’re not random. Green = State highways, Blue = Local roads, Brown = Tourist attractions, etc.
Wrong: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11164413
plenty of yellow and white out there too. apparently the residents can decide which colour suites their houses better
Well, not street signs, sure. But I don’t think anyone’s getting that confused that the street signs in one city are blue, and in another they’re white. I seriously doubt that every street sign in the whole of Europe is the same colour, either.
The main directional signs, that point the way to places distant, are all colour coded.
From memory it was around the mid or late 1990s these large signs first appeared, initially in the Auckland City Council area only. Some beaurocrat must have decided we needed a new policy, as soon they had sprung up across the city. Perhaps there was the odd missed turn, but I don’t remember much of a problem as every car had a map and you would check that before leaving home if you didn’t know where you were going. Now they’re almost everywhere, I tend to think they are out of proportion and don’t help set a ‘human scale’ streetscape, and smaller signage would be more appropriate for 50km/hr zones.
More importantly, these signs are obsolete now every car can have a GPS. If there are drivers without, reliant on the signs, they can pick one up for the price of a tank of gas. Time to reset the standards, save ratepayer money and clear up the streetscape.
+1
ejtma, you seem to miss the point.
The size of the second sign is not in question, considering the post referred to “big directional signs”. However, the content displayed by the second sign is relevant, considering the sentence goes on, “designed to be read by people at speed”.
Implicit in your concern for “most road users” is the classic fallacy that the largest group (statistically, the mode) of a population deserves absolute priority. This is backwards, and creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that overindulges automobiles. Instead, we as a city ought to decide what sort of diverse transport environment we want, and change our supply of infrastructure to suit so that people are free to make the choice to switch.
Also implicit in saying “see it at distance so they can change lanes” is a heavy status quo bias. You are presuming that the speed of automobile travel could not be reduced, and that the number of traffic lanes could not be lowered. This is to dismiss all other safety measures a priori. However, we really need to exercise the full menu of options to make transport safe as soon as possible.
If the photo depicts the outcome of an intersection safety review, then it might be sensible to question the quality of the review. There is an institutional imbalance in traffic engineering towards optimising for motor vehicle movement, so it is plausible that the review did not reflect a wide enough range of values to begin with — and that would be worth looking into.
The rest of your message is solely from the perspective of a motorist. That’s fine to account for, but it isn’t the whole picture. Giving another angle is exactly what the post and photo do.
Reduce the number of lanes on Tamaki Drive? Clueless idiot
Brilliant counter argument – maybe you could do a guest post to flesh out your well thought through position.
How’s this… should Tamaki Drive be reduced to a single lane in the area in question, all traffic turning into Ngapipi Road would cause a huge backlog of traffic extending to the CBD, which would have detrimental flow on effects for all other road users, including buses and, yes, precious cyclists. So with a single lane you’d either have to eliminate the possibility for turning right into Ngapipi (good luck) or suffer the consequences of a massive traffic snarlup.
The sign is needed to increase visibility because of the odd nature of the bridge that traverses the inlet into the Orakei Basin. It stops the tendency for sudden breaking and last-minute lane changing by increasing the visibility to oncoming motorists and giving them time to get in the correct lane. Meanwhile, that stretch of Tamaki Drive should be 60kph – most people seem to travel quite comfortably (including buses!) along that stretch between Ngapipi and Quay Street at a slid 60.
Or alternatively we could reduce it to a single lane outside the mini golf course And then go out to 1 lan and a right turn bay about 100m from the ngapipi road intersection
Sigmund,
Should so many cars dominate Tamaki Drive, such that they would threaten to create a backlog of traffic (which wouldn’t even require very many people to pull off)?
Em,
> Reduce the number of lanes on Tamaki Drive? Clueless idiot
I hope I’m not too late. Please keep your eyes on the road and/or load. I can only assume you composed this perfunctory but most urgent missive whilst driving and/or operating heavy machinery.
“Implicit in your concern for “most road users” is the classic fallacy that the largest group (statistically, the mode) of a population deserves absolute priority. ”
Agreed. Some time last year I watched a few episodes of the serial TV documentary about the Wellington rescue helicopter. I recall one episode they had to attend a collision between a train and a car somewhere in Kapiti. The Fire Service guy in attendance said that it was the third incident he had personally attended at that level crossing, including one fatality.
So it is pretty clear that level crossings are killers. They might be in “the wrong”, but careless motorists don’t deserve to be killed by trains, just because those trains are full of people. So I’ll agree with you that this absolute priority for trains on railway lines needs to end. Trains need to slow down until they are able to stop before hitting careless motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists who fail to observe crossing rules at level crossings. It might take commuters a lot long to arrive in town, but that is a false assumption that the speed of rail travel could not be reduced. After all, we need to exercise the full menu of options to make transport safe as soon as possible.
Except that trains are legally required to slow down for level Crossings for exactly that reason
It doesn’t seem to have worked. They’re in the news again today: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/9642363/Train-hits-car-on-West-Coast . ” A KiwiRail spokeswoman said the coal train was en route to Lyttelton from Westport. It weighed more 2000 tonnes and was about 470 metres long. A train that size would take about one kilometre to stop, she said.” That’s just madness. Imagine if a truck took a kilometer to stop and therefore killed any cyclist, motorist, or pedestrian careless enough to get in its way. The train needs to be traveling at a speed that enables it to stop within 50 meters or so.
You seem to make an assumption here. I regularly cycle to work and use the cycle path where this sign is and find no issue with it. I also drive and know this intersection very well. You miss the point, if you go to the location you will see the photo grossly misrepresents the reality.
There is a bridge between the two signs that rises at least 3-4m on the vertical, the distance between the signs I guess would be around 25m, the second sign is needed to be visible so people can see it before they get to the bridge and can safely change lanes therefore making the environment safe for all road users. I doubt it is designed to be read at speed, that simply supports a theory that Tamaki Drive is a quasi motorway, which it isn’t. The sign is designed for all road users and to be read at a distance which it needs to be given the location of this intersection, which can’t be changed too much given the body of water that surrounds it on 3 sides, and a massive cliff on the fourth. (although I do note that Auckland Transport are going to try and will no doubt make it 10 times worse for everyone)
As for the speed sign, I simply don’t see the point of it, but Auckland Transport seem to like them, you can’t drive much more than the normal speed for traffic along this stretch of road, which I would put at between 45 and 55, otherwise the cops will get you (as they police this road pretty heavily as they should), and/or you will end up having an accident. Anyone who uses this road regularly knows that. I think it is a reminder to motorists to slow down where there are lots of cyclists and for that purpose it works well.
Tamaki Drive sure feels like a quasi-motorway, i.e. an expressway. Access points are few, and there seem to be about 2.5 to 2.8 lanes on each side of the road making it feel like a high speed environment. Usually these signs are placed where people regularly speed, often seem to placed on 50k roads than are designed like 70k roads.
ejtma,
I see we’ve numbered the signs differently, which is curious. You’ve taken it in the order of depth in the axis of travel, whereas I understood it as the order of appearance in the image. This might not be trivial: one is from the perspective of prescribed movement, the other of static place (or gradual, non-linear motion).
See, you’ve repeated the idea that some lane-changing that ought to happen. And that executing the manoeuvre could be risky for all road users. (And that everyone endangered is a “road user”, but we’ll overlook that for now.) The question is why does anyone exit the bridge so fast that it would be dangerous to process the sign then? With a road diet or ordinary traffic calming, couldn’t the minimum observation distance be relaxed so automobiles can change lanes (or not have to) more safely?
Also, being a satisfied bike user isn’t saying much. It’s plain that a number of Aucklanders are satisfied with the status quo cycling environment. What’s interesting is for whom the design fails, and how and why, so it can improve.
There’s a lot of problems with signage on the streets – especially clutter from things like parking restriction signs, and directional signs that block part of the footpath. The overhead signs on Nelson, Hobson and Fanshawe are overdone – they look motorway scale, and they keep people looking up and a thousand yards ahead, rather than paying attention to what’s in front of them.
But this photo doesn’t put the sign in the context of the intersection, and the conclusion is ridiculous. Good signage is important for any mode, the faster it can be read and understood the less it’s going to distract people from driving. Often it just reassures people that they’re already going the right way, and that alone is a good thing to stop people searching distractedly for clues about their location. How much attention to be people pay to the road when they’re searching for a house number or street sign?
Most of the directional signs in Auckland – including here – are entirely suitable for 50 km/h traffic. These signs don’t cause people to speed – there’s lots of other design features in our roads, from the setbacks to the lane width, that determine the speed people naturally drive at. This sign would be out of place on a 30km/h street, but every other aspect of Tamaki Drive is designed for 50 km/h, and as long as that’s the case, the signs should suit the speed, rather than being made disproportionately small.
I think that this post is a bit overblown, having recently driven in unfamiliar towns with poor signposting, then clear signage is good, Auckland is an intimidating place for out of towners to drive in so it’s safer for all if signs are clear, legible and well placed
This whole post is ridiculous. Anyone using this stretch of Tamaki Drive appreciates clear signage. But nah, we gotta complain about that too.
obi,
Actually, you’re not far off the mark. Let’s see if we can sort out your analysis.
Level crossings are killers and this must be remedied, for the benefit of everyone. But how and why?
Exercising the full menu of options would probably suggest grade separation at most urban locations before anything else. However, slowing down trains is still on the table — as pointed out, this already happens to some extent. There will be other options in between, too, like better automatic sensing or just creating a more comfortable waiting experience.
The matter of serving the most people is subtler than you think. There is an imperative to do the greatest good for the most people, but how this is framed can get tricky. We should not simply hold a finger to the wind and reinforce a particular activity of the greatest number of a certain type of user, precisely because of the feedback loop where demand is induced by supply. This carries the danger of locking us into what is essentially a local optimum in a Nash equilibrium. Better still to discover a globally superior set of choices (which may be a different yet diverse mix of transport modes, say) that would best serve a community, and then build towards that vision instead.
This is because transport choices are not perfectly elastic or inelastic, but somewhere in between; they benefit from economies of scale; and they are subject to co-ordination problems across a set of actors. In other words, chicken and egg. Present behaviour may be individually rational but collectively sub-optimal, so it’s a poor measure of best intention: we can’t all vote with our feet when there is no footpath. The gap is evident in deeper polling and consultations, such as what led to the Auckland Plan, which clearly supports a vision of a liveable city built at human scale.
So the way out is for members of a community to communicate with each other, understand multiple perspectives, develop shared priorities, and actually implement it. This blog, this post, and this discussion are all helping with that (I hope).