www.photographybykatie.co.uk

The arrogance of signwriters

By Clark Nida

People continue to get stranded on the Lindisfarne Causeway.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-13830017

But when it happens again and again, might it not be the sign that’s at fault?

A lifeboat volunteer is quoted as saying says it is “quite bizarre” that tourists continue to try to drive on a tidal causeway outside safe crossing times. He continues:

“None of those who are caught out are locals, it’s always people who are visiting the area. They all seem to think it’s not their fault, but they’ve totally ignored warning signs on both sides of the road.”

To use a term like “totally ignored” displays total ignorance of communicating with the general public. There is a whole field of study called Human Factors: an important one, judging by how many disasters are attributed to “human error”. Yet it is so rarely applied, and recommendations to do so are defied. If you fail to read the mind of a Heaven-Born Official, then it is you that are at fault.

North-Eastern officialdom can be very pompous, parochial and patronising. In fact “pee” sums up the attitude. It won’t occur to their arrogant narrow petty little minds that the sign is incomprehensible to English-speaking foreigners who, understandably, cannot imagine that a public road may be frequently impassable but not gated. Whoever thinks it’s adequate to control a level-crossing with nothing but a sign saying “DANGER DO NOT PROCEED WHEN TRAIN REACHES GATES”?

The word “proceed” is a fuzzy one and won’t necessarily suggest “go” to an English-speaker who is not English. “Causeway” is not a widely familiar word either, in a highway context. When was the last time you knowingly drove along a “causeway”?

Writers of road-signs feel compelled to use a pompous form of English which nobody actually speaks. Do they suppose they are incribing messages from God on tablets of stone? What’s wrong with this?

STOP. TIDAL ROAD. YOU WILL DROWN IF THE ROAD IS NOT DRY.

The spokesman goes on to say “It is all so preventable.”

It is indeed.

Have they actually tested the comprehension of the sign by people who don’t live in Northumbria? And whatever happened to International Road Signs? For our self-satisfied county councillors the vast effort into standardising them has been of no consequence. And yet they expect their own capitalised mystic puff to be instantly understood and acted-upon.

“You do wonder what people put on their insurance claim forms in such cases,” says our dismissive spokesman. How about: “County Council in violation of their duty to protect the public by not gating the road and by not erecting meaningful signs”?