5 ms·

There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of

There is an analogy here to the slippery-slope of attention-getting ads on the Internet. Once upon a time an ad was just a static (not even animated) banner of a certain size and shape. 468x60 was one of the earliest, IIRC. Advertisers invented new formats ("skyscrapers", "xl-leaderboards", "300x250", and so on), and also they got animated, and then they started expanding outside their areas, and so on; each new ad temporarily performed literally dozens of times better than the previous due to shock value. A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's, and, worse, the old format would fall even further because it was too subtle. So in the long run, the money would stay the same, but the pages got uglier, formats got crazier. The game theory is clear: everyone is incentivized to upgrade to the new formats, but once there, no one is better off (neither the publishers nor advertisers), and the readers themselves are far worse off. We're seeing this now with traffic signals: if every crosswalk in the world is replaced with this 3D version, we'll see a temporary boost in safety, but in the long run it may return to normal and in my opinion, our world will be uglier. I don't like our public spaces covered in optical illusions. In my area I've started to see red lights that are so bright you are temporarily blinded at night if you look at them. And they've even begun attaching strobing white LED's to the center of some of them. I would guess these perform great in short-term studies. Just like flash ads with games in them.

kartan 9y ago
> A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's When Sweden changed driving side, that is exactly what happened. "The relatively smooth changeover saw a reduction in the number of accidents. On the day of the change, only 157 minor accidents were reported, of which only 32 involved personal injuries, with only a handful serious. On the Monday following Dagen H, there were 125 reported traffic accidents, compared to a range of 130 to 198 for previous Mondays, none of them fatal. Experts suggested that changing to driving on the right reduced accidents while overtaking, as people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, thereby having a better view of the road ahead; additionally, the change made a marked surge in perceived risk that exceeded the target level and thus was followed by very cautious behavior that caused a major decrease in road fatalities. Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents dropped sharply as a result, and the number of motor insurance claims went down by 40%. These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to 'normal' over the next six weeks and, by 1969, the accident rates were back to the levels seen before the change." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H
- llukas 9y ago
  This illustrates that if drivers feel less safe then they drive more safely and pay attention more. It is one of motivations for removing all signage so drivers feel less safe permamently. http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lights-improve-flow-and-safety/ http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/removal-road-markings-safer-fewer-accidents-drivers https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/remova...
  - brianberns 9y ago
    I think that removing all signage would have a similar effect: short-term reduction in accidents, but then a rebound (or worse) once drivers adapt.
    - apsdsm 9y ago
      Okay, fine. Then we ramp it up by employing hundreds of clowns to hide in the bushes on the side of the road and jump out when the driver least expects it.
      - brianberns 9y ago
        Hah. I say we skip the middlemen and deliver electric shocks directly to the driver's hands through the steering wheel at random intervals.
      - notatoad 9y ago
        in denmark, they tried using topless women for speed control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb07a2YGDKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb07a2YGDKM
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Replace all the signs once the rebound begins, and you’ll re-befuddle everyone. Take the signs back down once that rebound hits, and repeat.
  - 9y ago
ianamartin 9y ago
Strongly agree with everything here. Just wanted to add that getting people accustomed to this has unintended consequences as well. Say you grow up in a place where this is the norm. Then you go to some place where this hasn’t caught on yet. You’ve been trained to look out for these obvious things and therefore pay less attention in general. You are now a more dangerous driver outside of this environment and possibly even within it. Some things are not supposed to be “easy”. When you’re driving around in a heavy metal object capable of killing or at least injuring other pepple, you are supposed to be actively paying full attention to all of your surroundings at all times. Making things stick out like this and tricking people into freaking out a little bit trains people to pay less attention in the long run. It’s the same thing you were saying about bigger and more obnoxious ads. I’m just making the connection explicit.
- falsedan 9y ago
  > I’m just making the connection explicit. You're making things up. Don't use 'common sense' and arguing by analogy for this: read actual behavioural science studies on driving instead. Or simply realise the difference between attention-grabbing as a distraction to your web using & as a signal to help you avoid killing yourself or others. My anecdotal evidence is that I don;t have any problem with this, I learned to drive three times in three wildly-different automobile environments, and I find street signs extremely useful and easier to miss. Holy crap why are UK speed limit signs the size of a paper plate.
jacquesm 9y ago
On a route through Germany that I take with some regularity there is a passage where they have been working on the road for years now. At the entrance to the roadworks are two giant flashing triangles, those work well in full sunlight but at night I have to close my eyes or look away while passing near them or I'll be totally nightblind for the next couple of kilometers which is not a very good thing to deal with while in a construction zone. Extremely silly that those things do not decrease their brightness at night.
- jacobolus 9y ago
  Any large bright signs at night should ideally restrict themselves to orange/red, and be of brightness appropriate to dark-adapted eyes. Even a lot of recent traffic signals have blue–green “go” lamps which are excessively bright. The new LED car headlights (especially seen on luxury cars) are universally awful: distracting, blinding, and wreck your eyes’ adaptation. When they show up on a tall vehicle like an SUV it’s even worse. Same goes for most LED streetlamps. Too much blue, too bright, and directly in the field of vision for drivers and pedestrians. Most new streetlamps could have their luminance reduced by half or more and have the blue part of the spectrum entirely removed and perform better at lighting the street while using significantly less energy. For best lighting, if planners cared about quality of life or road safety, there should be more, dimmer, lamps spaced closer together, on lower lightposts, and better shielded to the sides, so that lighting would be more even instead of having some blindingly bright areas and others lost in shadow. Of course, that would defeat part of the purpose of switching to the new lights, which was to reduce the number of lights (because they could be made brighter and therefore placed high up and far apart).
  - userbinator 9y ago
    The new LED car headlights (especially seen on luxury cars) are universally awful: distracting, blinding, and wreck your eyes’ adaptation. When they show up on a tall vehicle like an SUV it’s even worse. Headlight brightness is somewhat of a balance, between blinding oncoming traffic and not being able to see far enough ahead. Dark adaptation has its limits. (AFAIK it's actually HID lights which make up most of the ridiculously bright headlight market.)
llukas 9y ago
Are there any longer-term studies you could refer to?
userbinator 9y ago
I can personally attest to this; I commented a short while ago about how I've been conditioned to almost completely ignore huge "Download Now!" buttons and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374013
ChuckMcM 9y ago
I have wondered if anyone has studied the 'Dole light' which in the US was the additional brake light added for additional visibility and to cut down on rear end accidents.
- vostrocity 9y ago
  Better known as the 'CHMSL' (Center High-Mounted Stop Lamps)
- shezi 9y ago
  The actual use-case for those is that you can see the brake lights coming on for not only the vehicle in front of you, but at least the one in front of that as well, since you can see through the passenger space of the car in front of you. So it's not just a psychological issue here, but an actual visibility issue. The same thing applies to blinker lights on side-view mirrors. They are much more visible at wider angles.
- vacri 9y ago
  High-mounted brake lights had an effect for the first 5-10 years or so, while they were still a novelty. After that, the benefit disappeared.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    And a source for that would be interesting, while it makes intuitive sense I'd love to see someone who tested that hypothesis rigorously.
    - vacri 9y ago
      I don't have a source for it, sorry. I was chatting to someone involved in car safety research around 10 years ago, so it'll have to be listed as 'anecdata'.
partisan 9y ago
In my area, the flashing white indicates that there is a red light camera and that you will be photographed if you run the red light. The truth is that the cameras are not always there, but the effect is the same.
thesagan 9y ago
Similarly, road signs are getting pretty dense in the area I live and elsewhere, too. There are so many warning and notice signs on the road in my new city I've found I've missed some of the more important ones until after more than a few drive by's.
Razengan 9y ago
> if every crosswalk in the world is replaced with this 3D version, we'll see a temporary boost in safety, but in the long run it may return to normal and in my opinion, our world will be uglier. Although the illusionary crosswalks shown in the article aren’t really ugly, and even advertisements, like the cute mascots and dazzling neons of Tokyo, can have a certain beauty to them, I agree that most garish attention-seeking traffic guides, even just roads themselves [1], generally make the world uglier. The solution may be to take humans out of driving altogether and just use signs and aids etc. that can only be seen by self-driving autoautomobiles. —— [1] For a little creative exercise, try to imagine an advanced city without any roads at all. I don‘t mean just flying or even teleporting anywhere, but without the need to go anywhere (in a hurry): Robots do all the work that humans cannot do from their homes. 3D printing/molecular fabrication lets you manufacture whatever you need from home, including food. “Beds” are now sleep pods that perform medical repairs. For emergencies you call self-flying taxis. Why even have roads by then? Factories and their mines would still need to be connected cheaply, so they can keep using the asphalt, but a sufficiently advanced city would/should eliminate the need of roads for human driving.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > Why even have roads by then? Emergency response vehicles? I imagine a flying fire engine could be quite difficult to use to fight a skyscraper fire. Also you need wide spaces between buildings to have light at ground level.
  - zachkatz 9y ago
    > Also you need wide spaces between buildings to have light at ground level. Tell that to almost anywhere in Europe: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shinjuku-Tokyo-Japan.jpg http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shin...
    - Swizec 9y ago
      Correction: when you have tall buildings they need to be spaced apart to avoid murkiness at street level. In San Francisco financial district it gets dark around 4pm in summer when sunset is around 9pm. Imagine if those skyscrapers were as close together as the buildings in your picture. Also I’m pretty sure that’s Japan. The filename says Tokyo.
kohanz 9y ago
> but in the long run it may return to normal and in my opinion, our world will be uglier. Not just uglier, but less safe in my opinion. If people have returned to their normal driving habits (speeding over these 3d illusions) it means that at some level, they have reprogrammed their brains to ignore some 3d-like obstacles, because they may be fake. It works in case of the illusion, but I wonder if it would eventually impede their reaction time to other real, but similarly appearing obstacles.
- stefco_ 9y ago
  Totally agree. This strikes me as a reckless strategy. The transportation authorities are quite literally training people to ignore their eyes when they see obstacles. You could argue that drivers should treat a crosswalk the same as a real obstacle insofar as they should slow down and carefully assess the situation before continuing to drive, but that sounds like every other idealistic, prescriptive (rather than descriptive) attempt at policy-making. The people who will treat crosswalks with care and attention were probably doing so already, and I suspect that the people who were not previously paying attention to crosswalks will quickly return to their old behavior. The failure modes also strike me as worse. If someone is already not paying attention, and they suddenly notice what looks like an object right in their path, they might reflexively veer away from it and into a pedestrian. I can think of other such scenarios. I just don't understand how this idea wasn't immediately and definitively struck down as soon as it was proposed.
sjwright 9y ago
France (and quite probably other European countries) is an excellent example of this. Zebra crossings are so common that they're almost completely ignored by drivers. In Australia they're used relatively sparingly which makes their presence noticeable to drivers. You don't need to do anything clever, just make them sufficiently uncommon.
- ygra 9y ago
  In Germany they are both common and work rather well. There's the occasional motorist who doesn't want pedestrians to have the right of way, but too have that with other things as well (making a turn, coming out of a roundabout). Overall however in this regard the rules of the road are observed well (now, speed limits, acknowledging cyclists, and overtaking on the right are different stories, of course).
- megablast 9y ago
  Yeah, and you have to cross without one, because they are too far away. I wouldn't use Australia as an example of good driving rules. You are allowed to get away with murder in Australia if you are driving a car.
  - sjwright 9y ago
    Not having a painted crosswalk is fine, it just means pedestrians will cross without a potentially misleading sense of entitlement to the road. Zebra crossings tend to be reserved for very high traffic areas, schools, etc. And they're usually very well signed, often with flashing amber lights. As for your other comment, that's crap. Australian drivers don't get away with squat compared to England or France. Our roads are almost infuriatingly sensible to the point of tedium. I thought brits were pretty good, but nowadays half of them don't use their indicators and the other half go 15-30 MPH over the motorway limit. (Citation: just got back from three weeks of driving in England and France.)
- seszett 9y ago
  Belgium has as many pedestrian crossings as France, and drivers very much respect them. To the point sometimes of stopping for pedestrians that were not even trying to cross. I think it's more a cultural thing than a problem with noticing them. I now try to pay as much attention in France as in Belgium, but in some places other cars will actually honk when you stop for a pedestrian. In some places in Asia or Eastern Europe they might even try to overtake you and actually endanger the pedestrian.
frik 9y ago
Exactly. What really helps are speed bumps.
- barsonme 9y ago
  and roundabouts! physical obstacles always seem to work best, for some reason ;)
celticninja 9y ago
Public spaces covered in advertising is considerably worse that optical illusions yet we have been putting up with it for years.

kartan 9y ago

> A year or two after a new, more intrusive format became ubiquitous, its performance would fall back to the old format's When Sweden changed driving side, that is exactly what happened. "The relatively smooth changeover saw a reduction in the number of accidents. On the day of the change, only 157 minor accidents were reported, of which only 32 involved personal injuries, with only a handful serious. On the Monday following Dagen H, there were 125 reported traffic accidents, compared to a range of 130 to 198 for previous Mondays, none of them fatal. Experts suggested that changing to driving on the right reduced accidents while overtaking, as people already drove left-hand drive vehicles, thereby having a better view of the road ahead; additionally, the change made a marked surge in perceived risk that exceeded the target level and thus was followed by very cautious behavior that caused a major decrease in road fatalities. Indeed, fatal car-to-car and car-to-pedestrian accidents dropped sharply as a result, and the number of motor insurance claims went down by 40%. These initial improvements did not last, however. The number of motor insurance claims returned to 'normal' over the next six weeks and, by 1969, the accident rates were back to the levels seen before the change." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagen_H

llukas 9y ago
This illustrates that if drivers feel less safe then they drive more safely and pay attention more. It is one of motivations for removing all signage so drivers feel less safe permamently. http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lights-improve-flow-and-safety/ http://thecityfix.com/blog/naked-streets-without-traffic-lig... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/removal-road-markings-safer-fewer-accidents-drivers https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/04/remova...
- brianberns 9y ago
  I think that removing all signage would have a similar effect: short-term reduction in accidents, but then a rebound (or worse) once drivers adapt.
  - apsdsm 9y ago
    Okay, fine. Then we ramp it up by employing hundreds of clowns to hide in the bushes on the side of the road and jump out when the driver least expects it.
    - brianberns 9y ago
      Hah. I say we skip the middlemen and deliver electric shocks directly to the driver's hands through the steering wheel at random intervals.
    - notatoad 9y ago
      in denmark, they tried using topless women for speed control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb07a2YGDKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb07a2YGDKM
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Replace all the signs once the rebound begins, and you’ll re-befuddle everyone. Take the signs back down once that rebound hits, and repeat.
- 9y ago

ianamartin 9y ago

Strongly agree with everything here. Just wanted to add that getting people accustomed to this has unintended consequences as well. Say you grow up in a place where this is the norm. Then you go to some place where this hasn’t caught on yet. You’ve been trained to look out for these obvious things and therefore pay less attention in general. You are now a more dangerous driver outside of this environment and possibly even within it. Some things are not supposed to be “easy”. When you’re driving around in a heavy metal object capable of killing or at least injuring other pepple, you are supposed to be actively paying full attention to all of your surroundings at all times. Making things stick out like this and tricking people into freaking out a little bit trains people to pay less attention in the long run. It’s the same thing you were saying about bigger and more obnoxious ads. I’m just making the connection explicit.

falsedan 9y ago
> I’m just making the connection explicit. You're making things up. Don't use 'common sense' and arguing by analogy for this: read actual behavioural science studies on driving instead. Or simply realise the difference between attention-grabbing as a distraction to your web using & as a signal to help you avoid killing yourself or others. My anecdotal evidence is that I don;t have any problem with this, I learned to drive three times in three wildly-different automobile environments, and I find street signs extremely useful and easier to miss. Holy crap why are UK speed limit signs the size of a paper plate.

jacquesm 9y ago

On a route through Germany that I take with some regularity there is a passage where they have been working on the road for years now. At the entrance to the roadworks are two giant flashing triangles, those work well in full sunlight but at night I have to close my eyes or look away while passing near them or I'll be totally nightblind for the next couple of kilometers which is not a very good thing to deal with while in a construction zone. Extremely silly that those things do not decrease their brightness at night.

jacobolus 9y ago
Any large bright signs at night should ideally restrict themselves to orange/red, and be of brightness appropriate to dark-adapted eyes. Even a lot of recent traffic signals have blue–green “go” lamps which are excessively bright. The new LED car headlights (especially seen on luxury cars) are universally awful: distracting, blinding, and wreck your eyes’ adaptation. When they show up on a tall vehicle like an SUV it’s even worse. Same goes for most LED streetlamps. Too much blue, too bright, and directly in the field of vision for drivers and pedestrians. Most new streetlamps could have their luminance reduced by half or more and have the blue part of the spectrum entirely removed and perform better at lighting the street while using significantly less energy. For best lighting, if planners cared about quality of life or road safety, there should be more, dimmer, lamps spaced closer together, on lower lightposts, and better shielded to the sides, so that lighting would be more even instead of having some blindingly bright areas and others lost in shadow. Of course, that would defeat part of the purpose of switching to the new lights, which was to reduce the number of lights (because they could be made brighter and therefore placed high up and far apart).
- userbinator 9y ago
  The new LED car headlights (especially seen on luxury cars) are universally awful: distracting, blinding, and wreck your eyes’ adaptation. When they show up on a tall vehicle like an SUV it’s even worse. Headlight brightness is somewhat of a balance, between blinding oncoming traffic and not being able to see far enough ahead. Dark adaptation has its limits. (AFAIK it's actually HID lights which make up most of the ridiculously bright headlight market.)

llukas 9y ago

Are there any longer-term studies you could refer to?

userbinator 9y ago

I can personally attest to this; I commented a short while ago about how I've been conditioned to almost completely ignore huge "Download Now!" buttons and the like. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15374013

ChuckMcM 9y ago

I have wondered if anyone has studied the 'Dole light' which in the US was the additional brake light added for additional visibility and to cut down on rear end accidents.

vostrocity 9y ago
Better known as the 'CHMSL' (Center High-Mounted Stop Lamps)
shezi 9y ago
The actual use-case for those is that you can see the brake lights coming on for not only the vehicle in front of you, but at least the one in front of that as well, since you can see through the passenger space of the car in front of you. So it's not just a psychological issue here, but an actual visibility issue. The same thing applies to blinker lights on side-view mirrors. They are much more visible at wider angles.
vacri 9y ago
High-mounted brake lights had an effect for the first 5-10 years or so, while they were still a novelty. After that, the benefit disappeared.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  And a source for that would be interesting, while it makes intuitive sense I'd love to see someone who tested that hypothesis rigorously.
  - vacri 9y ago
    I don't have a source for it, sorry. I was chatting to someone involved in car safety research around 10 years ago, so it'll have to be listed as 'anecdata'.

partisan 9y ago

In my area, the flashing white indicates that there is a red light camera and that you will be photographed if you run the red light. The truth is that the cameras are not always there, but the effect is the same.

thesagan 9y ago

Similarly, road signs are getting pretty dense in the area I live and elsewhere, too. There are so many warning and notice signs on the road in my new city I've found I've missed some of the more important ones until after more than a few drive by's.

Razengan 9y ago

> if every crosswalk in the world is replaced with this 3D version, we'll see a temporary boost in safety, but in the long run it may return to normal and in my opinion, our world will be uglier. Although the illusionary crosswalks shown in the article aren’t really ugly, and even advertisements, like the cute mascots and dazzling neons of Tokyo, can have a certain beauty to them, I agree that most garish attention-seeking traffic guides, even just roads themselves [1], generally make the world uglier. The solution may be to take humans out of driving altogether and just use signs and aids etc. that can only be seen by self-driving autoautomobiles. —— [1] For a little creative exercise, try to imagine an advanced city without any roads at all. I don‘t mean just flying or even teleporting anywhere, but without the need to go anywhere (in a hurry): Robots do all the work that humans cannot do from their homes. 3D printing/molecular fabrication lets you manufacture whatever you need from home, including food. “Beds” are now sleep pods that perform medical repairs. For emergencies you call self-flying taxis. Why even have roads by then? Factories and their mines would still need to be connected cheaply, so they can keep using the asphalt, but a sufficiently advanced city would/should eliminate the need of roads for human driving.

Swizec 9y ago
> Why even have roads by then? Emergency response vehicles? I imagine a flying fire engine could be quite difficult to use to fight a skyscraper fire. Also you need wide spaces between buildings to have light at ground level.
- zachkatz 9y ago
  > Also you need wide spaces between buildings to have light at ground level. Tell that to almost anywhere in Europe: http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shinjuku-Tokyo-Japan.jpg http://newworldeconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Shin...
  - Swizec 9y ago
    Correction: when you have tall buildings they need to be spaced apart to avoid murkiness at street level. In San Francisco financial district it gets dark around 4pm in summer when sunset is around 9pm. Imagine if those skyscrapers were as close together as the buildings in your picture. Also I’m pretty sure that’s Japan. The filename says Tokyo.

kohanz 9y ago

> but in the long run it may return to normal and in my opinion, our world will be uglier. Not just uglier, but less safe in my opinion. If people have returned to their normal driving habits (speeding over these 3d illusions) it means that at some level, they have reprogrammed their brains to ignore some 3d-like obstacles, because they may be fake. It works in case of the illusion, but I wonder if it would eventually impede their reaction time to other real, but similarly appearing obstacles.

stefco_ 9y ago
Totally agree. This strikes me as a reckless strategy. The transportation authorities are quite literally training people to ignore their eyes when they see obstacles. You could argue that drivers should treat a crosswalk the same as a real obstacle insofar as they should slow down and carefully assess the situation before continuing to drive, but that sounds like every other idealistic, prescriptive (rather than descriptive) attempt at policy-making. The people who will treat crosswalks with care and attention were probably doing so already, and I suspect that the people who were not previously paying attention to crosswalks will quickly return to their old behavior. The failure modes also strike me as worse. If someone is already not paying attention, and they suddenly notice what looks like an object right in their path, they might reflexively veer away from it and into a pedestrian. I can think of other such scenarios. I just don't understand how this idea wasn't immediately and definitively struck down as soon as it was proposed.

sjwright 9y ago

France (and quite probably other European countries) is an excellent example of this. Zebra crossings are so common that they're almost completely ignored by drivers. In Australia they're used relatively sparingly which makes their presence noticeable to drivers. You don't need to do anything clever, just make them sufficiently uncommon.

ygra 9y ago
In Germany they are both common and work rather well. There's the occasional motorist who doesn't want pedestrians to have the right of way, but too have that with other things as well (making a turn, coming out of a roundabout). Overall however in this regard the rules of the road are observed well (now, speed limits, acknowledging cyclists, and overtaking on the right are different stories, of course).
megablast 9y ago
Yeah, and you have to cross without one, because they are too far away. I wouldn't use Australia as an example of good driving rules. You are allowed to get away with murder in Australia if you are driving a car.
- sjwright 9y ago
  Not having a painted crosswalk is fine, it just means pedestrians will cross without a potentially misleading sense of entitlement to the road. Zebra crossings tend to be reserved for very high traffic areas, schools, etc. And they're usually very well signed, often with flashing amber lights. As for your other comment, that's crap. Australian drivers don't get away with squat compared to England or France. Our roads are almost infuriatingly sensible to the point of tedium. I thought brits were pretty good, but nowadays half of them don't use their indicators and the other half go 15-30 MPH over the motorway limit. (Citation: just got back from three weeks of driving in England and France.)
seszett 9y ago
Belgium has as many pedestrian crossings as France, and drivers very much respect them. To the point sometimes of stopping for pedestrians that were not even trying to cross. I think it's more a cultural thing than a problem with noticing them. I now try to pay as much attention in France as in Belgium, but in some places other cars will actually honk when you stop for a pedestrian. In some places in Asia or Eastern Europe they might even try to overtake you and actually endanger the pedestrian.

frik 9y ago

Exactly. What really helps are speed bumps.

barsonme 9y ago
and roundabouts! physical obstacles always seem to work best, for some reason ;)

celticninja 9y ago

Public spaces covered in advertising is considerably worse that optical illusions yet we have been putting up with it for years.