Road signage forces

Traffic signs are necessary for road safety. This is especially true of signs with important traffic rules such as speed limit, open or closed, direction of travel, place on the road and right of way. These rules are crucial for preventing dangerous situations. The environment has a major influence on being able to quickly perceive traffic signs. This includes the amount of traffic and the number of traffic signs per road length and potentially distracting images in the background.

Safety
To improve the contribution of signs to road safety is to distinguish between important and less important signs. Also, signs should be recognizable and understandable. Also road signage can contribute to road safety, provided the application is limited to special situations and provided the beaconing fits into a package of various local measures.

Situations
Special situations include warnings for intentional route restrictions in residential areas, transitions to a lower speed limit, sharp turns in 80 mph roads or temporary road work.

Residential areas
In residential areas, it is common to use curves, narrows and speed bumps to enforce low driving speeds. This works well only because speeds are not very high anyway and only on the condition that these intentional restrictions are clearly visible day and night. One way to do this is to use beaconing.

Built-up area
At the transition from outside to inside the built-up area, in many cases the speed needs to be reduced considerably from 80 to 50 or 30 kilometers. In addition to speed limit signs, all sorts of gate-like structures are tried out in practice to emphasize the transition. Certain markings on the road have the same effect.

Drivers do not see all the important signs. Experienced drivers are more guided by the behavior of other road users. Most attention goes to the traffic instead of paying attention to the road signs. Road design also determines driving behavior. Features of the road surface, such as lane width, layout into lanes and lanes, and the road course appear to be the most important cues in choosing driving speed. Road markings force the driver to follow the directions.