Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Feds Order States to Stop with the Silly Road Signs" video.

They can't do that, the feds are the ones that decide what is and isn't a legal sign and the ones that contribute significant amounts of money to pay for the roads directly. Those billboards are owned by private citizens that do have 1st amendment rights. That being said, I completely approve of having those signs removed as they only serve to distract drivers from driving. It's not like there's a way of building them to only be attractive to passengers.
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That's why some highways in the US have random jogs every few miles to try and keep drivers awake while driving through particularly boring parts of the country. White line fever is a real thing and can get people killed if nothing is done to address the issue.
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There are a lot of foreign drivers in the US, and a fair number of autistic people that can drive, but require additional effort to decode the language. There's a limit on how many characters can be on a sign for it to be legally enforceable. We used to have a school zone here where the name of the school was long enough to make it unenforceable. The reason it was illegal is that it ran the risk of distracting drivers as it would take too much attention to fully read the sign.
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No. For one thing, the states have the ability to keep the signs and give up their highway funds. For another thing, I don't think that state governments have any constitutional right to freedom of speech anyways.
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Not really, there are rarely major changes made to it. The standards get updated regularly to account for changes in technology and changes in how people use the roads. Most of this stuff hasn't changed in decades. And usually what changes isn't something that's going to be radically different from what has been done as educating motorists about new signs can be difficult once they've got their licenses.
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@PilotFlight2Mars In the US we refer to those "survive stations" as rest stops and major highways will have one roughly every 2 hours. The government doesn't provide coffee r the like, but often times you'll see volunteers doing so. Bikers particularly appreciate it as dehydration can be absolutely brutal during the summer. From what I understand, those jogs are the result of how the US was surveyed using the range and township system. The jogs aren't really that random, they'll typically come at the end of one of those squares. If I understood correctly, they also apply to highways that either predate the interstate highway system or are too small to get better stuff. Much of the US is so flat that they could put the roads wherever they wanted to, so the jogs were needed to ensure that the drivers would periodically have to do something to snap them back to what they were doing.
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As much as I hate the metric system, I love the sign design on the traffic signs that most other countries use. They're designed to use as few words as possible so that the signs are understood no matter where you are.
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They're the ones that write the manual, they're the ones that pay money to help build the infrastructure. States are free to give up the money and to do whatever they like. Personally, I like being able to travel anywhere in the US and know that I'm not likely to be confronted by any roadway signs that I have to study up on to avoid being killed in a crash.
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Remember, there are people who are barely literate that do drive and not everybody understands figurative language well enough to properly interpret these signs while also operating an extremely dangerous piece of equipment.The amount of reading that it takes to operate a car safely, shouldn't be much. Most of the signs use pictures and numbers that are familiar to most people around the world. The bulk of the rest of it is names to things that you can probably ignore unless that's the thing you're trying to get to.
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The fact that it doesn't exist in your eyes isn't relevant. The fact that the issue exists for other people is what matters. Plus, the fact that you're not distracted by the signs, does not prevent you from being hit by somebody who is distracted by the signs.
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@jamescaron6465 You can read it, I put a link to it in my other comment here.
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That's good. Drivers in general are distracted enough and I personally hate having to decode figurative language while driving.
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@demonpanther290 Where did I say that? I'm saying that things like "hocus pocus drive with focus" take a lot more concentration and represent more distraction than "distracted driving kills" or "Please concentrate on driving" do. And BTW, I'm licenced on 2, 3 and 4 wheels, I can drive just about anything 26,000# or less, I'm not the problem, the problem is clever signs that just serve to distract from the practice of figuring out what those other knuckleheads are doing on the road. I should be able to glance at the sign, see what it means and immediately get my eyes back on the road to scan ahead for trouble ahead.
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That depends where you are, but if such a display does cause a crash, then the operator likely is on the hook for some portion of the damages.
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@Times_Ticking True, but to some folks, any time the feds do anything, it's an overreach because they don't want government at all.
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I agree that it should be banned specifically because of your second sentence. There's a lot of people who lawfully and safely drive vehicles that are distracted by those sorts of signs. In much of the world, there are no words on signs unless absolutely necessary and usually because it's a name.
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They don't need it, the census data showing the various immigrants that are allowed to drive is more than sufficient justification for banning the practice. The burden of proof in this case is on the people that want the funny signs to show that they're more effective or at least safe. Which they likely can't do because they do require more processing time and depend on higher levels of English. The signs used in the US already use a lot more words than the ones used in most of the rest of the world where the signs have the least amount of words possible so that they can be used by countries that are used to having a lot of people from other countries driving through on their way to another country.
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Which is true, but that doesn't require humor. "Destracted Driveing Kills" "Please pay attention to the road' "Put away the cellphone" all have similar meanings in terms of paying attention to what you're doing, even if they do have a slightly different meaning, none of those are hard to understand or require undo attention.
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It won't, at this point anybody who doesn't know that safety belts generally save lives isn't going to be reached by a sign, no matter how clever it is. Around here safety belts have been required in any vehicle that came with them factory installed since sometime in the mid-80s. Anybody young enough to know what on fleek is, is probably somebody that's too young to have ridden in a car that didn't have a factory installed safety belt for every seat. (Side note, I remember going with my dad to a junkyyard to get a lap belt for the rear seat because the Toyota they bought only had 2 rear belts even though it had 3 rear seats)
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They're not. If they were more effective, the change wouldn't be happening. They confuse significant minorities of drivers with little gain.
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@I..cast..fireball You can and should ignore the billboards, these roadside message boards are intended to be read by motorists and are supposed to be written in a way that they can be quickly read without distracting drivers.
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@travisd6863 And presumably if a billboard really is so distracting as to cause a crash, there's the possibility of going after the billboard operator and whoever it is that paid for the ad.
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