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Sign Posts

Radio silence here owing to an unwelcome combination of too much work and illness.

But I just wanted to take a moment to recommend my Slate colleague Julia Turner’s series on signs.

Signage—the kind we see on city streets, in airports, on highways, in hospital corridors—is the most useful thing we pay no attention to. When it works well, it tells us where we are (as when an Interstate marker assures us we’re on the right highway) and it helps us to get where we want to go (as when an airport banner directs us to our gate). When it fails, we miss trains, we’re late to appointments, we spend hours pacing the indistinguishable floors of underground parking garages, muttering to ourselves in mounting frustration and fury. And in some cases, especially where automobiles are involved, the consequences of bad signage can be fatal.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Etc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Sign Posts”

  1. Jan Says:
    March 8th, 2010 at 4:38 am

    Thanks for the tip, Tom! I even went looking in the archive that is my desk drawer, for a map I drew two years ago. Now Julia has received at least one contribution from The Netherlands :-).

  2. Jan Says:
    March 8th, 2010 at 4:39 am

    Oh, and get well soon!

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

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