The age-old pursuit of high school kids and university students is to collect road signs. Late at night, when no-one is there to witness the offense, they yank the board off its post and take it home, to store on their bedroom wall as a trophy. Every municipality has encountered this problem, and it persists through generation after generation. One day those boards may end up as old metal signs for sale.
Of course, the rest of us understand how important road markers are. They control traffic flow through static direction at a fraction of the price that other methods would entail. Law enforcement officers are paid salaries and electric signage uses power, but metal boards on posts have no overhead costs once they have been planted. Unless someone decides to loose a few rounds into them on an abandoned road, that is.
The very first road markers were probably stones, or stone piles. People have always navigated according to landmarks and using stones to create artificial landmarks is nothing new. Later on, the stones themselves were marked with numbers or names, such as the remaining distance to a town. The ancient Romans used stone columns to mark out the distance to Rome.
With the advent of mass-produced automobiles, there was a new incentive to institute a comprehensive system of road symbols. One of the first such systems was invented by the Italian Touring Club in 1895, in order to satisfy the need for proper signage for motorists. Over the next few decades, various developments saw the rise of a more systematic and extensive signage situation.
Uniformity is one of the key factors in designing road symbols. Of course, maintaining a uniform appearance across national borders is difficult. For example, the UK was initially the only country to persist in using miles as the unit of distance, while the USA developed an entirely independent system of symbols in 1960, but later began to incorporate sign features from other countries. Some countries, in turn, made use of the American system.
The challenge in designing road symbols is that they have to be universally intelligible. In other words, they need to be understood by a vast variety of people, many of whom have limited literacy or who do not even speak the native language(s) of the country in which the symbols are to be used. Shapes and colors therefore become very important in trying to attain universal legibility.
At the same time, people do not have very long to read and assess road signs, since they are traveling at relatively high speeds when they read them. The signs need to be quickly comprehensible too. This makes the use of color extremely important, as well as large, bold text and numbers.
At present, road signs are made of thin, light metal like aluminum, covered in a protective and reflective plastic coating. This means that the signs have no significant re-sale value, unless they are of historical significance, which may be why they get stolen and stored in private homes. There is usually a story to be told about old metal signs for sale.
Of course, the rest of us understand how important road markers are. They control traffic flow through static direction at a fraction of the price that other methods would entail. Law enforcement officers are paid salaries and electric signage uses power, but metal boards on posts have no overhead costs once they have been planted. Unless someone decides to loose a few rounds into them on an abandoned road, that is.
The very first road markers were probably stones, or stone piles. People have always navigated according to landmarks and using stones to create artificial landmarks is nothing new. Later on, the stones themselves were marked with numbers or names, such as the remaining distance to a town. The ancient Romans used stone columns to mark out the distance to Rome.
With the advent of mass-produced automobiles, there was a new incentive to institute a comprehensive system of road symbols. One of the first such systems was invented by the Italian Touring Club in 1895, in order to satisfy the need for proper signage for motorists. Over the next few decades, various developments saw the rise of a more systematic and extensive signage situation.
Uniformity is one of the key factors in designing road symbols. Of course, maintaining a uniform appearance across national borders is difficult. For example, the UK was initially the only country to persist in using miles as the unit of distance, while the USA developed an entirely independent system of symbols in 1960, but later began to incorporate sign features from other countries. Some countries, in turn, made use of the American system.
The challenge in designing road symbols is that they have to be universally intelligible. In other words, they need to be understood by a vast variety of people, many of whom have limited literacy or who do not even speak the native language(s) of the country in which the symbols are to be used. Shapes and colors therefore become very important in trying to attain universal legibility.
At the same time, people do not have very long to read and assess road signs, since they are traveling at relatively high speeds when they read them. The signs need to be quickly comprehensible too. This makes the use of color extremely important, as well as large, bold text and numbers.
At present, road signs are made of thin, light metal like aluminum, covered in a protective and reflective plastic coating. This means that the signs have no significant re-sale value, unless they are of historical significance, which may be why they get stolen and stored in private homes. There is usually a story to be told about old metal signs for sale.
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