Name: Why US Signs Look Different Than The Rest Of The World’s
Uploaded: 2024-06-03T13:42:57.000Z
Duration: 6 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Most places in the world, the road sign for no stopping, as in don't stop your car here, looks something like this.

Slightly different shades of blue, but basically the same.

India's looks like this, Mauritius' looks like this, in a few countries there are these cute white borders, Japan's looks like this, slightly different angle but basically the same.

Pretty much every country in the world has universally decided that the sign for no stopping is a blue circle, outlined in red, with a red X through it.

In the United States, the sign for no stopping looks like this, and it's not the only example.

Most countries' sign for speed limits looks like this, the US's looks like this.

In a technical sense, the car was invented in 1886 in Germany by a guy named Karl Benz, but in a patriotic sense, the car was invented in 1908 in Detroit, Michigan by a guy named

Henry Ford loved two things—being anti-Semitic, and producing cars at a scale and at cost that made them an actual, viable means of transportation for people, as opposed to previous car models that were essentially just novelties.

Soon, its manufacturing dominance turned the United States of America into the car capital of the world, which soon also made it into the road capital of the world—a fact that everyone thought was great and continues to think is great and has generated no controversy or existential urbanist crises whatsoever.

Early road signs, much like early roads, were somewhat eclectic and decentralized, often just created by and maintained by private automobile clubs.

But in 1927, the American Association of State Highway Officials, or ASCHU, published a compactly named Manual and Specifications for the Manufacture, Display, and Erection of U.S. Standard Road

Modemursum, which, as you might suspect, created specifications for the manufacture, display, and erection of U.S. standard road markers and signs.

Then, in 1930, a different group, the National Conference on Street and Highway Safety, or

NUCSUS, published the more urban-focused Manual on Street Traffic Signs, Signals, and Markings, or MOSTSAM.

Seeing as having two standardization standards wasn't a particularly standardized standard, in 1931, a joint committee was formed, which ultimately gave birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy that we call the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, a modified version of which we still use today.

The original 1935 MCCUD laid out such hits as the octagonal stop sign, although it was yellow at the time, one-way streets, railroad crossings, in addition to specifying stuff like fonts, post designs, and of course, everyone's favorite, minimum vehicular volumes warranted for fixed time signals.

Now it's 1951, and what's that sound I hear?

Oh man, it's the rest of the world, and guess what, they have cars now.

Oh man, it's the newly formed and not-yet-notoriously-ineffective United Nations, and they want to develop a worldwide standard for road signs so that people driving in foreign countries don't see a sign saying railroad crossing, not know what that means, and then get pancaked into oblivion by Thomas and Friends.

So the UN set up an experiment in a few countries and five US locations—Ohio State Route 104 near Columbus, US Route 250, and Virginia State Route 53 near Charlottesville, Minnesota

State Highway 101 near Minneapolis, and some various other roads in New York—where they displayed road signs from a number of different countries to see which were most effective.

And not surprisingly, it turned out that Americans, still riding the intoxicating high of World

War II propaganda and American exceptionalism, did not take kindly to European-looking triangles telling them how to drive.

Let's take a look at this gem of an article from the Mansfield News Journal titled,

Ohioans Tell Europe to Leave Its Signs, which includes such quotes as,

I just don't see why we have to take any advice from Europe about our highway signs, and if I saw a Russian sign, I certainly wouldn't pay any attention to it.

Nonetheless, the experiment continued, data was collected, and ultimately that data would later grow into the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals—a C-tier Vienna convention that created a universal road sign system, which has been joined by 69 countries and today governs the road signs seen in most of the world.

It's the reason that all the no-stopping signs look the same.

But adding to their long, illustrious history of spearheading international treaties that they then refused to sign, the United States refused to sign it.

First off, America is number one and nobody tells us what to do, least of all our own federal government.

See, technically, legally, roads are under the purview of the states, not the federal government, and so the federal government signing a treaty telling them how to handle their roads is a bit legally murky—although apparently not that murky, seeing as the 1966

Highway Safety Act was able to force all states into compliance with the Mutt Kid using a clever little constitutional workaround called extortion, threatening to pull 10% of their federal highway funding if states didn't comply.

Second, at the time of the treaty, the US was starting to work on what would ultimately become the interstate highway system, which they felt would require a lot of breathless, fast-paced innovation in the rough-and-tumble world of road signage, and they didn't want to be bogged down by the strictures of a treaty.

And third, given that the US had the most robust vermin history in the world, Americans were pretty attached to their existing signs, and they didn't much want them to change.

This was proven in the 1970s, when the Mutt Kid tried implementing the Vienna Convention's focus on image-based instead of America's more text-based signs, which turned out to be a terrible failure, with drivers so confused about what things like this meant that we felt we needed to add back in the text explaining that the thing in front of them was a drawbridge, not a sick ramp for kids.

In 1978, the Mutt Kid quietly removed its language about preferring image-based signs.

I should also mention that yes, there are a number of other countries that haven't joined the Vienna Convention, including China, Canada, Australia, and Ethiopia, so yes, not all other countries' signs look the same, so all the people with comments already typed up about how this video is too US-centric and I'm a self-obsessed egoist American road sign file, you know what, actually go for it, it increases common engagement.

If you think back to a time when you really struggled to learn something, chances are you were reading a big block of text and hoping the concept it described just clicked.

Meanwhile, if you think of a time when you learned something easily, it was almost certainly an instance of learning by doing.

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