"NY" wrote in message
...
"Tim Streater" wrote in message
.. .
In article , NY
wrote:


(roundabouts)
are infinitely better than American four-way-stop junctions which make
everyone stop even if you can see that there is no traffic coming from
any other direction that you would need to give way to.

+1 to that, having suffered from them for 12 years. They have lousy
throughput. And what's more, you'd better stop, otherwise a praying
mantis aka cop car will appear from nowhere and give chase.

And they put stop signs in dopey places, too. Like, you're driving
along, and suddenly there's a stop sign. No roads off in any direction,
just the klod living at that spot got fed up with people barrelling
through.

They also measure distances in strange units: temporary roadworks often
have signs giving the distance to the speed restriction or
single-alternate-line working... measured in feet, rather than yards or
fractions of a mile. A sign saying "Roadworks in 1300 feet" means a lot
less that "Roadworks in 500 yards" or "Roadworks in 1/4 mile" (I've
rounded the numbers). Maybe it's because I always think in the largest
unit that expresses the quantity without losing too much precision - hence
human weights in stones, not pounds, and road distances in yards or miles
rather than feet. The largest distance that I saw expressed in feet on a
sign was (I think) 10,500 feet which is two miles :-)

The most incomprehensible sign that I say said

PED
XING

Uh? Then I realised that it was for a pedestrian crossing :-)

And it obviously did that because of the length of those two
words which is a problem for most signs of reasonable size.