Ireland, thoughts on road signs

Jun 20

Posted by Sandro Paganotti in Web 2.0 - comments are closed

We’ve just come back from a short and relaxing trip to Ireland, while travelling around this amazing and inspiring country we found ourselves thinking about the way the Irish street signs are structured and which good and bad ideas are in the design.

Bad Ideas

There are two big sources of confusion related to Irish signs: sign colors, sign positions and shapes

Sign colors
There are two main colors in the Irish Street Signs, white and green. The problem is that both of these colors are often used out of their respective conventions (white signs for regional roads and green signs for national roads), so it could also happen that a sign pointing to a shop/bed and breakfast/place of interest has exactly the same colour and shape of the one pointing to a national road.

Sign positions and shapes
Other than colors, the position and the shape of the signs are also not standardized, it could happen that a national road, usually identified by a big green sign at eye level, belongs to a little green sign in the baseline of a roundabout.

Good Ideas

I found a lot of inspiration looking at the Irish way of structuring road signs:

Parentheses
If you are travelling on the N18 and you are nearby Limerick, while looking for Tralee you’ll find signals with a code like N21 Tralee (N69 Dingle). What does this means? That the way you’re going, taking the (N21) will bring you to Tralee and from there you’ll find a new road (N69). Smart isn’t it? It’s like building a 2 level direction tree for each sign.

Progress bars
On a national road in the proximity of an exit you’ll find a sort of street progess bar, three signs with three, two, and one white bar placed in the last 300meters before the exit, 100mt apart from the each other. Very useful especially at night.

Named roundabouts
Each roundabout in Ireland has its own name (‘Joyce’,’Martin’,ecc…). This result is very useful for anyone (like me) searching on the map for the exact point of where they are.