Hello!
Why do you have emojis as road signal? And how should I interpret them? This one I suppose means that there is a bad road for another two km. The ones before were red and the one where the bad road ended was green. Why do I need the emoji? 🙂 is it just for fun?
by lillafleff
3 comments
just for fun
It is a try to transport some sort of emotion / pity for the inconvience. Strictly factually of course the emoticons are not neccessary. It is also meant to make drivers maybe more attentive by breaking up the boringness of a long construction site with low speed limit and implying some sense of “future” when the driving is normal again.
I think that there have been studies that suggest that putting these smileys into long construction sites reduces the amount of accidents within the constricted section of the road.
Just think about the smiley or frowning faces that in Germany as well as in other countries appear in electronic tables that measure if you are respecting the speed limit or not. They are also not formally neccessary, but a means of communicating with the drivers.
They mark the beginning (red/sad), middle (yellow/neutral), and end (green/smiling) of road works.
By their large size, dissimilarity to other road signs, and slightly tongue-in-cheek nature, they supposedly help notify and remind drivers of the construction site and its assciated changes of road conditions (narrower/fewer lanes, lowered speed limit, and/or restrictions on overtaking or even driving next to one another) and help reduce frustration. Officials from the states that use them claim that road construction sites with such smiley face signs cause 30% less road accidents than sites without such markers.