While walking along a sleepy residential street in my St. Paul neighborhood, I noticed something ugly about a traffic circle.
There are eight signs in total; four warning of the upcoming traffic circle and four instructing each direction which way to navigate the circle.
We need to design residential streets in a manner where most signs are not required. Here’s another example a couple blocks south in Highland Park.
This is another sleepy residential side street with no significant traffic flow and a low speed limit. So, why are there signs warning you of a stop sign less than 200ft away? These types of signs are all over the place.
These neighborhood signs are unsightly, expensive and unneeded. Supposedly designed to make driving around our neighborhoods safer, but they do little of the sort. They offer a false sense of security on local streets where vehicles should be driving slow enough that seeing traffic circles or stop signs shouldn’t be a problem.
We should to sell these signs for scrap and use the money to fix neighborhood problems like this:
Bonus: How San Francisco redesigned those confusing “no parking” signs.