Road signs and Irish Language

To me the blue background with White or yellow writing is much clearer especially in the dark. Than the green background ones.

I just realised when I did a basic web design course years ago. There was emphasis on colour schemes and font that go well together, reams of examples. So it should be known to the signage designers?? What are they at?

Plus I remember the colour scheme, I used blue background with white and a bit of yellow!

The snooker score graphic uses a blue / white / yellow colour scheme for the world championship- very clear. The colours compliment each other.

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As regards the Irish language bit for the longer place names As Gaeilge- wouldn’t it make sense to come up with standardised abbreviations instead, so it looks less cluttered?

Let’s be honest at times some Irish place names are a bit on the long side / plus nothing like the English version. Compromise could be reached by abbreviations.

The BLOCK CAPITALS stand out when driving at speed

Yep I liked the colours. The only reason I didn't prefer that is because the yellow is earmarked for the primary details or critical information. But I definitely find it easiest to read.

@EthanL13 “well known facts” are often not facts at all.

As I understand it, there are two advantages to using capitals for names: first, you get a larger X-height for a given line height, and second, the capital alphabet has fewer lookalikes than the lowercase (consider i / l / t; t / f ; h / b; e / a; rn / m ).

Based on @EthanL13's concept designs, what about keeping the English names capitalized? The fact that the Irish is not italicized makes it so much easier to read in my opinion.

I agree that the OLA is utter nonsense but it doesn't apply to road signs, thankfully.*

@EthanL13 , any particular reason you changed KILLORGLIN to Killorglan?

• Although there are plenty of examples where "WRONG WAY TURN BACK" signs on sliproads have only Irish text on one side of the road - who is most likely to be driving on the wrong side of the road? Tourists. To make it worse, the Irish-only sign is placed on the right-hand side where a right-driving tourist will be used to looking for signs. Language-tokenism comes before safety.

Is it just me, but I find the "Stay in Lane" road markings really confusing on some of our roads (e.g. M50/M1). On the road it's written as....

LANE

IN

STAY

I was talking about the older "WRONG WAY TURN BACK" signs with no symbol. And older junctions may not be as well designed as that one. Plenty where you enter a slip road from a T-junction or crossroads not a roundabout, nothing to make a wrong turn "difficult" there.

A sign is there to convey information, a warning sign with Irish text only utterly fails at that task so why have the sign at all in that case?

@Peregrinus - if they were already driving on the right-hand side of the road up to that point, there’s a danger of joining on the opposite carriageway as it looks like the more gentle curve “on” (even though it’s actually the off ramp). It’s mainly a problem of rural motorways - in more built-up areas, the traffic on the roads leading up to the junction keeps drivers on the proper side of the road.

(These signs are on the junctions for the N40 South Ring Road, a road I have never seen empty)

TII has a policy of putting those yellow “Drive on Left” signs up around popular tourist spots: people are more likely to make the mistake after a long period of not driving.

There’s also a problem when coming off a motorway and re-joining two-way traffic, but our junction designs at off-ramps make it much harder to end up on the wrong side of the road on leaving a divided highway than in some other places I’ve been.

And I’m saying they’ve been replaced, years ago. Even when they were still used, I have never seen an example of only the Irish version present on a sign. If you can show me one, we can continue to discuss whether or not it’s a good idea for it to exist, but until it’s proven to exist, there’s no point, really.

The argument that "Wrong Way Turn Back" is more relevant than "Cas Ar Ais" signs because "foreigners" doesn't massively stack up. It's not always for foreigners, it's often for confused Irish people.

The ones around the airport are ...quite logically.... in French, German, etc. Though I'm not sure anyone gets overly concerned about those examples of multilinguality,

A great example was the one just before the Kinsale Road Roundabout at the bottom of the hill with "conduire a gauche" and "links fahren" also. I always thought, if they'd made it that far on the wrong side of the road, they might as well continue!

The first type of N-road sign we got with km on it (late 70s) was definitely a darker green. Not really recent though...

You keep saying “brighter”, but that’s not the difference. The signage in Ireland is generally a different hue, not a paler shade. Also, it really depends on what you mean by “the UK”. Where are you referring to specifically? I posted a link to the “standard” previously. There is no such thing as a “standard colour” for UK (or Irish) signage, just a range of acceptable colours, and there is variation across the UK.

The type of reflective materials used for signage has changed several times in the last few decades, with the newer types being much more reflective. You can see this where signs have been patched. (I posted an advance direction sign for Hangar Lane in London a few pages ago where this is clearly visible).

@Hotblack Desiato the very first signs used a kind of reflective paint - there are very few of these left in Ireland, but you can find the odd survivor in small towns. Later signs used a prismatic material, which reflects more light. This is what makes them appear brighter. Those materials have continued to be developed over the years, and signs erected in the last 10 years are noticeably more reflective than earlier ones.

You’ll note it’s always someone else’s confusion that they’re worried about...

In fairness, this thread wasn’t about being confused by Irish on signs, but rather as a suggestion on how to accommodate both languages on a sign without the result being as ugly as it is at present. It got hijacked a couple of times, but we’ve managed to avoid the dark pit of language politics.

I’ve taken wrong turns, but never because I couldn’t determine what the place was from a sign-board. I’ve also taken wrong turns in countries with monolingual signage: off the top of my head, places where I’ve made wrong turns include Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, France, UK and the United States, and except for Czech, in each of those I also had a enough of the local language to be able to read directions like “KEEP RIGHT” or “NEXT EXIT”. If you were to ask me the main reason for missing a turn, I’d say the most common cause was that the placement of the sign was misleading with regard to where the required turn actually was: the USA is particularly bad in this, as they don’t use “fingerpost” signs on junctions very consistently (or at all sometimes) to confirm that you’re going the way you think you are.

But again, arguing on behalf of some unidentified yet incapable person is the hallmark of a weak argument. In all the years we’ve had accidents on the road, if just one driver had ever told the press “I was confused by the two names on the sign” we would have heard about it, don’t you think? Especially given the antipathy toward the Irish language in large parts of the Irish population.

It’s a non-issue. The bigger problem with Irish road signage is the occasional inconsistency of the designs, and the fact that in some locations, there’s too much of it to take in at once.

The Republic has a very confused bilingual policy in general.

Our road signage standards are a reflection of that.

There has been a change of materials, though. Two at least over the last thirty years. You can clearly see it where old signage has been patched in the UK: the new material is more reflective and thus appears brighter, even in daylight. Our major-route signage is still all too young for there to be much evidence of this, but the UK has an older stock, and so has more chance of repairs. If you drive at night, this becomes extremely obvious.

It is the hue of our signs that is different, it’s more towards cyan than the UK’s more yellow hue. But that’s nothing to do with the reflectivity of the signs themselves. Incidentally, the shade of yellow we use here is also different: the UK uses a “warmer” (more orange) tone, we use a “cooler” (more green) tone. If we used the same shade of yellow as the UK on our bluer signs, it would create a slight strobing effect.

Our motorway signage uses a very slightly more saturated blue colour than the UK’s, but the hue is much closer than with the green boards. The ISO colour spec for blue signs is much tighter than that for green, so there’s less permitted variation anyway.

On these two random samples (M1 Louth, M45 Birmingham), the HSL colour picked off the photo gives a Hue reading of 220 and 221 degrees. That’s a negligible difference: ambient light and time of day would account for a bigger variation.

This is no longer in the Traffic Signs Manual, thankfully. At first, these used to say “An Lár TOWN CENTRE”, then that changed to “Áitainm TOWN CENTRE” (name of place in Irish), but now it’s just “Áitainm PLACE NAME”, with both present.

Of course, the problem with the new system is that for bigger towns, there’s now no clear direction that shows you the way to the actual centre.

Italy’s signage system uses a bullseye symbol that indicates the way to centre of the named town: it would be a nice thing to adopt here, I think.

(The brown/yellow signs are

Not American at all - the inspiration is more obviously the German “Spielstraße” sign (which I’ve seen erected here by councils in one or two places):

That used to be only used for residential streets with high chances of children playing (hence “Spielstraße”), but now officially it is used for any area where the road is shared by cars and pedestrians.

When first introduced in Germany, these had a supplementary plate underneath that read “Spielstraße” (there was one near to where I lived a long time ago), but years later, it’s sufficient to just mount the main pictogram sign without description. I suspect these will go the same way here over time. After all, I remember seeing “Roundabout Ahead”, “Signalised Roundabout Ahead” plates on signs a long time ago, but they’re completely absent these days - once people know what the symbols mean, there’s no need for the additional plate.

We do, but only for new concepts. Then we revert to symbol-only signage. Like I said, I can’t remember when I last saw a “roundabout ahead” sign plate, but there was a time that they were affixed to lots of roundabout signs. Now, there’s just the symbol with no explanation needed.

The way we do it is normal in other countries too. When a sign design (or the traffic control it represents) is new, its meaning is usually spelled out too. After a few years, there’s no need to do that anymore.

The difference with the American system is that with ours, the text is present to aid comprehension, whereas in American signs, there is only the text. For example, this “design”:

However, you might be surprised to see that this is also part of the same system:

... and note the supplementary plate describing the sign. The explanation for this is that the Federal Highways Agency knows that English-only signs are a safety problem, and has actually been sneaking toward using pictorial signs, but like just everything in that country, adopting ideas from other places runs the risk of some oddball Senator, usually a Republican, vindictively killing your budget for being “unAmerican”.

That’s not exactly what I was talking about. The idea (if there even was one) was that there a lots of places whose Irish name and English name are so similar when written down that someone with zero knowledge of Irish could recognise the place just by trying to pronounce the Irish name as if it was in their own language. In such cases, you could get away with only putting the Irish one on the signboard, and it would make the signs clearer.

“Baile Munna”, “Doire”, ”Fionnghlas” all fall into that category, but I’d argue that names that use an articles in Irish, like “An Chill” and “An Nás” are too much of a leap, and so would need their English version too. (an aside, I’ve never liked the use of “an Nás” for Naas. “Nás na Ríogh” always seemed to be more popular within the town itself, and the use of the definite article always seemed odd).

.. but “Baile Eoin” there is an example of what not to do. This absolutely needs dual-naming, because there’s no phonetic hint at all. The only way you can figure out that this is a direction to the place known in English as “JOHNSTOWN” is if you know that “Baile” is the Irish for “town”, “Eoin” is the Irish form of the English name “John” and that the word order indicates the genitive case (i.e. "TOWN of JOHN").

“Béal Feirste” also fits the “phonetic enough” pattern, but it should stay in English, because it’s a destination outside of the state. Many countries keep foreign destinations in their native language as a courtesy to travellers who will also be following signage in another countries to get to their destination.

For example, on this sign from Italy, “Nizza” and “Nice” are the same place. (Oh, and Genova here is the Italian city that we call Genoa, not an Italian spelling of Geneva, which would be “Ginevra”).

... and this Austrian motorway sign goes further. German-speakers would know the capital of the Czech Republic as “Prag”, but “Praha” is what the Czechs call it. The logic behind this one is that once you cross the border, only “Praha” will appear on signs within CZ, so it’s good to get used to it now...

Of course, destinations within a country are subject to no such courtesies, and in the case of Belgium, local signage can be outright hostile to visitors, as the choice of whether LIEGE/LUIK, MALINES/MECHELEN, ANVERS/ANTWERPEN or MONS/BERGEN are on the sign depends on where you are...