I saw myself doing this in realtime when visiting California for the first time. The initial shock of seeing signs that warned of cancer causing chemicals in buildings quickly faded when I realised they were on every building - soon becoming as blind to them as the locals.
To be honest this is a general problem with the UK. Try driving on any major street and you'll realize it's plastered with mostly useless signs. A dozen warnings assault your senses at any one time, which makes it very difficult to pick out what is actually important. This is compounded by sometimes completely braindead implementation of rules. E.g. most bus lanes in London can be used by motorcyclists, but some cannot. There's no rhyme or reason, the entire thing is decided by a small blue sign at the start of a particular stretch which may or may not have an even smaller motorbike icon on it - among an icon for a bus, taxi and pushbike. Whoever thought this is a good idea is either a moron or deliberately wanted to extract fines from motorcyclists who accidentally use the wrong bus lane.
> To be honest this is a general problem with the UK
Hotel lifts would appear to be another example of this. Automated "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements seem to be present almost everywhere.
Presumably a significant number people suffer appaling crush injuries from lift doors in other countries ... or maybe they don't, and companies across the UK just let their Health and Safety conslutants get the upper hand.
Blind person here, I find the "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements pretty tiresome, and I don't think they provide any benefit to us.
They sometimes even make things worse. Especially on bilingual elevators (not that uncommon in European countries where English isn't an official language), there are so many announcements that the elevator just can't keep up when there's a lot of traffic. I've seen a few elevators that were always a few announcements behind during periods of high activity.
The "lift (elevator) going up / down" announcements, on the other hand, are quite helpful, and I vastly prefer the European system than the American mess of ADA-compliant beeps.
(speaking as a person who isn't blind) The biggest omission seems to be that there is nothing to tell you what floor you've arrived at. This is probably fine for an empty elevator but as soon as it gets busy and there are 10s of floors I'd imagine it gets hard to navigate.
The "tunnel ahead" sign always struck me as particularly pointless. Who needs that sign? Surely if you're driving towards a tunnel, the enormous tunnel itself is the indication you need that you're heading towards a tunnel?
Those are for truck drivers and those carrying dangerous goods
The Blackwall Tunnel in London has those signs starting something like ten miles south (ie on the edge of the city!), to try an ensure such vehicles don’t reach the tunnel unwittingly and force it to be closed.
I mean the one they put directly in front of a tunnel, with the tunnel picture inside a red triangle. I live quite near Blackwall tunnel and haven’t seen it any of those on the approach. The ones you’re talking about are, I believe, red circles containing the actual restrictions which are, of course, fine.
Also strictly speaking, the restrictions, even if those red circles were combined with the tunnel warning, the tunnel warning is still irrelevant - you’d have to follow those restrictions whether or not there was a tunnel.
I'm sorry, but UK is positively devoid of road signs compared to some other countries lol, I've been driving here for well over a decade and it's really nice how few signs are here and it mostly relies on common sense.
67 road signs on a 360 metre long stretch of road - and to me, what's shown in the picture is very typical, especially in big cities. There are soooo many signs it's close to impossible to read all of them and still look at the road.
At a society level, ads are paid for with the opportunity cost of other things that people could be thinking about, e.g. cancer-curing drugs. We can therefore say that ads cause cancer.
Both are at the cost of a generally more tranquil and quiet environment. I would take the most boring, crack-filled and grayest concrete wall over someone else’s messaging whether it is paid for or the agency’s own propaganda.
One of the reasons that people like many tourist destinations is that many tourist destinations forbid most outdoor advertising. It's subtle, probably many tourists don't even realize it, but it changes the entire feel of a place.
Putting up a sign is not a free action!