Traffic Sign
Traffic signs or road signs are signs erected at the side of or above roads to provide information to road users. The earliest signs were simple wooden or stone milestones. Later, signs with directional arms were introduced, for example, the fingerposts in the United Kingdom and their wooden counterparts in Saxony.
With traffic volumes increasing since the 1930s, many countries have adopted pictorial signs or otherwise simplified and standardized their signs to facilitate international travel where language differences would create barriers, and in general to help enhance traffic safety. Such pictorial signs use symbols (often silhouettes) in place of words and are usually based on international protocols. Such signs were first developed in Europe, and have been adopted by most countries to varying degrees.
Read more about Traffic Sign: Categories, History, Europe, Mexico, South and Central America, Automatic Traffic Sign Recognition, Street Sign Theft
Famous quotes containing the words traffic and/or sign:
“There’s something about the dead silence of an office building at night. Not quite real. The traffic down below is something that didn’t have anything to do with me.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)