The Parking Lot Designers Who Cried Wolf

Cry "Wolf" too often, and eventually people ignore you; then, when you really mean it, you're stuck.

Same thing happens with road signs and drivers. Put road signs in the wrong place, or put obviously ludicrous speed limits on a road, and people start to ignore them; it's human nature. It is also happening all over, and getting worse it seems.

We got a new shopping mall here in Pitt Meadows a couple of years ago. Upon driving into the parking lot the first time, my initial comment was "the guy who designed this parking lot got a really good deal on a bunch of stop signs, and decided to use them all, no matter what."

Nobody obeys all of the stop signs. Only a hand full obey any. There are stop signs at cross-walks that get maybe a couple of dozen pedestrians a day, and otherwise should be "stop for pedestrians" as most cross-walks are.

There are stop signs at points where the "cross" traffic is limited to truck backing into a loading bay, and the bay has a gate across it most of the time.

There are stop signs where there is no reason at all for a stop sign; no cross traffic, nothing.

All these signs simply teach people to ignore stop signs. Add to this the fact that they have no force of law as they're not on municipal roads, and you have stop-sign fatigue. 

I've written earlier about the construction speed zone signs that hang around forever, and the absurdly low speeds on one of our local bridge approaches.

All of this leads to the point that handing out tickets to those of us who transgress these signs is only half the problem - in fact it looks to me like it is less than half the problem.

The real problem as I see it is that our overly paternalistic (or patently self-serving) government bodies are as much a part of the problem as are those who actually get the tickets (I pause here to state that I have not had a ticket is quite a number of years, mostly due to luck and good eyesight I'm sure.)

In New Zealand, where I met my first wife in the early 70s and had had a wonderful holiday with my second wife in the mid 90s, the speed limit on most back roads is 100kph. This does not mean you can drive 100kph all the time!

What it means is, you had better not go faster than 100kph. How much slower than that is something you, as the driver, have to deal with, depending on road conditions, your vehicle condition, and of course your own abilities and condition.

Get caught driving faster than the speed limit by even one or two kph, and you're likely to get a ticket. Drive off the road and/or cause an accident and you're most likely to get a ticket for "dangerous driving"  - with a far higher fine than mere speeding.

There are almost no "slow to..." or other warning (yet equally ticketable speed offences here in North America) signs. Seems like a good idea to me.

Driver responsibility works. Distracting numbers of signs does not. When will the "authorities" learn?

richard