My great grandma had a similar story, the bus stop was in front of my grandparent's bedroom, they hated that people would gather in their bedroom window. she asked for the stop to be moved a few meters down the road, so it is between the houses and not in front of it. the municipality denied her.
Until that point the bus stop was nothing but a sign, she heard that they were going to remove it and install a proper bus stop with a bench and shade.
She asked the city build it a few meters down, still nothing.
the night before they began construction, my great grandma just moved the sign to where she wanted it. they built the bus stop where the sign was, and today, that bus stop is still where she wanted it to. Possibly until perpetuity
Possibility: They know it’s in the wrong spot. They don’t know why. So they figure someone screwed up, they don’t know who, but they don’t want it to be them or their department. So nobody says anything, and the stop remains unchanged.
We have no knowledge of why it was there in the first place, we're only given one side of the story. Maybe this was closer to a crosswalk, or nextdoor was less safe. We don't even know if the stop existed there before she moved in. We don't know. All we know is old lady didn't like view of people outside her window and decided that instead of dealing with it she had to change it herself.
you are free to give it the worst possible reading. it is a story I heard from family of events that happened maybe 70 years ago. the stakes couldn't be lower. unless you figure which municipality and bus stop were talking about, then you can complain and have the bus stop reinstated in front of the bedroom I might inherit someday
I'm forced to give it the worst possible reading because we don't have the other side. Personally, I read this as some HOA type who can't be bothered to have a few people milling around while waiting for the bus.
For context I got a picture of the place in google maps. and discovered that said bus station is no longer there at all, but I have marked were the bedroom is, the original location (straight in front of their window. and the exchanged location, no one was inconvenienced by that change. and albeit it was a minor inconvenience for my great grandparents, the fix was trivial.
To me, that's even less of a reason. They could still see in, she could still see them, I side with the city still. What was the point of moving it except wasting taxpayer money?
or maybe the city council couldn't be bothered to move the sign a few meters to the left, and the fact that the construction still went through and nobody complained or pointed out any possible problems means that it was a non-issue
Your defense is entirely based on speculation that makes your side look correct, when you simply made it up out of thin air. That is not a legitimate position.
I wonder what problem the original sign addressed. Because forbidding turning right for 2 ½ hours every morning sounds extremely specific, and sounds like one neighbor in particular had some beef with another or something, and got the city to put up the sign.
And maybe that neighbor left, or whichever problem was being addressed didn't exist anymore.
I know that's a thing because a long time ago, we had a "15mph - blind children at play" sign in our street, until someone pointed out that the blind child in question was now an adult and had moved out years ago, and the sign was just annoying everybody for nothing 🙂
In other words, the guy might have replaced a useless sign with another, equally useless one on his own dime. Maybe he could simply have called the city to wonder what the sign was for, and possibly have it reviewed and removed altogether.
Given the original sign covered 7-9.30am seems like it's to prevent people cutting across traffic during peak commuting time either to prevent accidents or improve the flow of traffic.
Also, sometimes, all it takes is asking a carve-out to make your life easier.
For instance, he could have asked the city to add an "except residents" sign under the existing one. At least where I live, you'd be surprised how accommodating the administration can be if you simply ask nicely with a good argument.
Hell, he could have added the sign himself for cheaper and I bet none of the other residents would have complained about it 🙂
Realllly depends on the city. Some places won’t even reply to you for months, and when they do it’ll be a bullshit answer because you’re not of the developers bribing them with millions of dollars…
There is a sign like this at the end of my street. It’s morning and evening rush times. The turn in question is an offset intersection through a busy road. If you are to take a left off my street you can easily be hit by someone taking a right from the street across into the middle of the road to then take a left from the perpendicular road onto my street. The city put some surveyors out there for a bit and with the accident data and all that determined my street can’t make our left at certain times but the street across can snake their way across town just fine. The 2 streets on either side of mine are just fine to left turn from, they don’t have the offset intersection. Nobody gets pulled over for the turn either but I’m sure if you caused an accident you would get an extra citation.
There is a guy down the road that used to have someone riding down his street with a loud muffler and blaring music trying to hyped up for work every morning around 8:30 So instead of putting a sign up that said no turn between 8-9, he figured if he put up a sign that said 7-9:30 it would seem specific and no one would question it. They would all think it was curated by engineers and traffic studies. Nah, dude just wanted to sleep in because he worked nights.
No apparently my comment wasn't obvious enough. I was attempting to imply that the afternoon rush hour traffic may have a similar restriction, during which Rush Hour 2 could be finished and Rush Hour 3 shown, but OOP didn't include whether such a restriction existed in the afternoon, as they would not typically be traveling by the same route in the afternoon, hence no need to change a presumably separate sign indicating the hypothetical afternoon/evening restriction.
Because the busy period in the morning and evening are more than 1 hour long about everywhere with people having differing work schedules that all begin and end within similar but not exact time frame.
If you bring it up, then it could end up in some bureaucratic limbo where nothing ever gets done. And then afterwards if you go to change it yourself they’ll figure it was you. So maybe easier just to change it yourself in the first place?
There's a sign by my house, on a road I need to turn right on at about 420 every day, that says no right-on-red turns between 730am to 430pm on school days.
It's frustrating, because it doesn't seem like it's actually protecting children for 9 hours a day
Are people really praising this? I guess fuck the engineers who did a traffic study, and fuck the school children walking in that area from 7-7:30 I guess.
to be fair on traffic engineers timing lights we have verifiable proof that sometimes adding roads can actually increase taffic (and that removing them can decrease it) And this information is not always taken into account on a high level so they get stuck trying to fix an innately flawed system.
I’m willing to hear you out. Your evidence for the sign being “wrong” is that it wasn’t discovered? Do you think that city workers would check to make sure the sign still said 07:00 and not 07:30? Why in the world would they check things like this?
Imagine you take out a good made stop sign. You'd probably have a lot of crashes in a short period of time and soon it would be discovered that something is wrong.
Apparently it hasn't happened, so it doesn't seem to be causing a lot of trouble.
The sign is there for a reason. If after modification that reason has not manifest itself, most likely the modification is within the margin of what the people who is regulating traffic want to happen.
Not everything needs to be on the same scale of safety. I’m not saying that this particular rule was 100% perfect, just that it’s not up to individuals to undermine them arbitrarily, and just because no one noticed in ten years does not mean that it was ok to do it.
I’m glad it’s not causing a lot of trouble anyway…
Ok cool so I guess OP is a civil engineer with a Professional Engineer license then, and got a resolution from the city/town's governing board giving them permission to change it. And they publicly bid the project to certified contractors.
Did you just invent a school zone to make an argument? What would the hypothetical civil engineers have to say after running countless hours of simulations on imagined children?
You're right, illegally changing a public sign on a public road in order to make your own commute marginally shorter is absolutely just totally cool, and you would know because you "work for the government".
Never said it was cool. It's not cool to make shit up to support an argument.
I worked for the government. I had a six month contract with Department of Justice on the massive influx of files shortly after red light cameras went up in our area. I filed traffic tickets, too.
One file that stuck with me was a commuter who accrued multiple speeding tickets over a few days in an area I knew well, because it transitioned from the highway to a residential area in like, no time, and the RCMP had set up a speed trap before the new speed sign. It's not clear it's residential because it's a forest on one side with a huge hill between the road and the houses on the other. He went to court to ask for a sign to be put up closer to the highway or the speed trap to be moved up the road. They didn't do either.
It’s nice to see a few folks pushing back. This whole thing has the narrative of the ol’ incompetent state with its endless red tape and arbitrary nonsense!
Sometimes those things are true and it can be a pain, but it’s the same reason we don’t go out for vigilante justice. It wasn’t arbitrarily installed and no one noticed it because there’s no reason to check things like that.
There's totally a reason to check things like that. If there were any accidents or reports of issues it would be investigated. If it was a common hazard, cops might even set up a trap to catch cars making illegal turns.
We have no idea why the sign was the way it was. They gave us no background. So I'm biased against the sign changer until given a good argument as to why it was acceptable.
Which government? Makes a big difference since some other better than others.
I'm not saying OOP definitely had no legitimate reason to change the sign, but without knowing, we can't assume they did either.
The fact they made no mention of it, leads me to suspect it was mostly for their personal convenience.
Also, government = inefficient is some neo-lib propaganda I can't tolerate. Any organisation can be inefficient (so, so, so many examples of this in the private sector), and governments can and must be set up to be well-run. The alternative is the privatised neo-lib hellscape we (countries in general) continue to not fix.
Uh... all I said was that I worked for the government. You're just making up your own little world over there, aren't you?
This argument is moot since I can't anticipate everything you're gonna think up in imagination land. Kinda hard to argue against things no one said.
absolutely… all the people praising this, like… those signs exist for traffic flow and safety… it’s so incredibly selfish to just say fuck everyone else, i need to turn right and even more selfish to avoid repercussions but making it “okay” for everyone else
maybe the sign was wrong, sure… but we don’t have that information… without more information, it’s an incredibly selfish act. dude has main character syndrome
You're right, OP's ability to marginally shorten their commute is more important than public safety, and the times indicated on those signs are completely chosen at random so it doesn't matter anyway.
This is done in a number of overpasses on the DC beltway and “mixing bowl”
A road may go North while the other direction goes East and the signs will point that out but the road might actually be labeled South for a bit despite the sign saying East.
So folks have rappelled off the overpasses and painted EAST and an arrow or NORTH and an arrow in places like this.
I've noticed this trend with "You Laugh You Lose" videos as well (yes, people are still doing those). Oftentimes they're 50/50 neat facts and incredibly niche brainrot memes.
Because the mods in this community give zero fucks about what's posted. You're more likely to get comments removed for pointing out shitty posts than a shitty post will be pulled.
because it's one of the biggest communities and splitting everything up into 1000 sub-communities makes all of them too small to be interesting, and i'd rather have one big "haha that's funny" meme community than 1000 small specific communities
We have a road that goes under a bridge so that you can make a right to go east on a 4 lane road. People would sit at that corner waiting to go left and it caused massive backups. (Which made no sense, why go under the bridge then? Use a different corner and make a right to go west!). We asked the city to make it right turn only - they interpreted it slightly differently and thought we meant people were heading straight the wrong way up a one way, rather than turning to that corner, came and put a temporary sign. I went with one of my kids, wearing safety vests, and moved the temporary sign to the corner we wanted it at.
Later the city came and put the permanent sign where we had it, and ALSO changed the paint on the road to make it one way right at the corner and disallowed left turns INTO that corner, they just broadly said no left. Which is good. Nobody should be stopping at the bottom of a bridge to wait to make a left turn.
It's not like NOBODY does the left anymore, but there are not backups now because nobody is going to sit there waiting to go left, they get honked at.
I have on numerous occasions considered ordering bike route signage to place up on bike safe routes. The city has official signs for it but puts basically none up. If I could just order a lot more to put up it could encourage more folks to join.
Huh, that's a bit surprising to me. I moved from a small non-highway connected town last year, and there was a pedestrian and bike path the entire 32 kilometre way from that town to the bigger nearby city.
Wonder how many bike that distance. Honestly must be a really nice path to bike in the summer.
France, while still seeing progress, is heavily car-focused. You'll see car streets in cities that can barely fit an Aygo. I only know as a tourist, though, so it might be better in areas I haven't visited.
I spent a weekend just filling all the potholes on my road. It wasn’t that expensive and it didn’t take long either. Turns out you can just do what you want
20 years ago, our town had a war over an intersection.
Someone decided to upgrade a 3 way intersection, for a a dirt road going into the woods off a main artery. (rumored someone in town planning bought a house on that road and was trying to make it so they didnt have to wait a long time for a gap in traffic)
So they made it a 3 way stop unsteady of just the dirt road having a stop sign. This caused tragic to back up miles on either side, as it was pretty much the only stop on the main road going out to the town's comercial district (100s of work vehicles traveling it at 9 and 5)
Almost immediatley, People started coming out with chain saws, and wpuld cut down the 4x4 wood signpost. Leaving the stump and the concrete block in the ground. Fairly quickly, the town ran out of room on the narrow strip between the road and the bike path, and started hammering in metal posts, wedged between the buried cement supports.
Guys with welders on their trucks started cutting those down flush with the ground. At one point, a cop car was stationed there overnight.
The police report detailed 2 trucks, with chain strung between them, driving on either side of the post at speed, wrapping the sign, and tearing it out of the ground before dropping the chain.
Thst was about as far as it got before town meeting, where an inquest was called for into the appropriateness , and approval process, and who had put in the work order etc. (There was some passage about the planning board being able to make minor changes to signage, etc without impact studies, and going through the approval process (which includes open forum, and with enough detractors to a project can force it to be put to a vote)
The main point of contention being how anyone qualified to be in that position could think that something that caused a 30-60 minute delay on a 5 mile road qualified as a 'minor change'
Iirc the whole thing ended with the town cementing over that little strip (covering over all the metal and wood protrusions, and effectively signaling a stop sign couldn't be put there anymore) and then several members of the planing commision, resigning their posts, which made the inquest moot.
I know it's not implausible, but the fabrication about contacting the company that had the contract to make the signs blew it all apart, the fonts are heavily controlled and copyrighted and they would lose the city contract if they got caught, no sign printing company is going to go out of business to make six bucks off some random dude.
I see this. There was another thread today where people were discussing if stuff like this counts as a "meme" or if it's off topic for this page. I'll be making a pinned post for community input tomorrow about a potential new rule. Stay tuned.
I seriously doubt it. Generally each city has their own sign-making department, if it's interstates, it's the state DOT doing it. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell signs that replicate them faithfully enough (including the reflective layer) to be swapped out - for exactly this reason. Otherwise this would happen all the time.
You can buy replicas of signs but they are usually a lot thinner aluminum and don't have the same layered reflective coating, and probably noticeably smaller too. That said, it is possible to buy the sign-making equipment and produce your own, if you were really so motivated, but now we're talking way more than a traffic ticket.
So just go take the sign down, so much simpler. Doubt they'd notice for a months or years, and when they replace it, just take it down again.
Any department of transportation isn't going to have their own print department, as far as I know. They contract out print jobs like that since the equipment and expertise to produce at scale are prohibitively expensive for just one client. As I've seen, that kind of job uses laser-etched plates on rollers with different plates for each colour. Pantone inks, probably. So they need the laser machine, a printer the size of a small apartment, the licensing, and all the materials, just for signs.
The reflective coating is just a simple laminated layer.
Source: Worked at a printers and toured a couple screenprinting shops who had contracts with the city. We'd print anything as long as someone paid and sent the correct filetype.
It's the same in Germany, I've been in a sign making factory and they will make signs for everyone who pays. The illegal part is not owning them, the only illegal part would be putting them up on public streets without authorization. You are definetly allowed to use these signs on your own private ground, on a private parking lot for example.
Because of this, I looked into whether the Canadian governments and municipalities had some kind of copyright, but couldn't find anything except laws against interfering with traffic. Enforcing a ban on making your own signs would be way more tedius than just saying "Don't fuck with traffic" anyway.
And yeah, you're right, there are signs like those all over private lots and around businesses. There's nothing special about the government ones.
My great grandma had a similar story, the bus stop was in front of my grandparent's bedroom, they hated that people would gather in their bedroom window. she asked for the stop to be moved a few meters down the road, so it is between the houses and not in front of it. the municipality denied her.
Until that point the bus stop was nothing but a sign, she heard that they were going to remove it and install a proper bus stop with a bench and shade.
She asked the city build it a few meters down, still nothing.
the night before they began construction, my great grandma just moved the sign to where she wanted it. they built the bus stop where the sign was, and today, that bus stop is still where she wanted it to. Possibly until perpetuity
Possibility: They know it’s in the wrong spot. They don’t know why. So they figure someone screwed up, they don’t know who, but they don’t want it to be them or their department. So nobody says anything, and the stop remains unchanged.
Yeah screw the public, she deserves her view
How's the public screwed in this?
We have no knowledge of why it was there in the first place, we're only given one side of the story. Maybe this was closer to a crosswalk, or nextdoor was less safe. We don't even know if the stop existed there before she moved in. We don't know. All we know is old lady didn't like view of people outside her window and decided that instead of dealing with it she had to change it herself.
you are free to give it the worst possible reading. it is a story I heard from family of events that happened maybe 70 years ago. the stakes couldn't be lower. unless you figure which municipality and bus stop were talking about, then you can complain and have the bus stop reinstated in front of the bedroom I might inherit someday
High stakes indignation, the highest possible. People with real problems don't get that high.
it was a trivial problem with a trivial solution. a complete non issue.
if it's a trivial problem with hard solutions, then suck it. if it's a real problem with trivial solution, then fix it already.
but trivial problem with a trivial solution? that's just good enough for a family anecdote.
I'm forced to give it the worst possible reading because we don't have the other side. Personally, I read this as some HOA type who can't be bothered to have a few people milling around while waiting for the bus.
For context I got a picture of the place in google maps. and discovered that said bus station is no longer there at all, but I have marked were the bedroom is, the original location (straight in front of their window. and the exchanged location, no one was inconvenienced by that change. and albeit it was a minor inconvenience for my great grandparents, the fix was trivial.
To me, that's even less of a reason. They could still see in, she could still see them, I side with the city still. What was the point of moving it except wasting taxpayer money?
You're literally not, in any way, forced to do that. That is a decision you have made.
or maybe the city council couldn't be bothered to move the sign a few meters to the left, and the fact that the construction still went through and nobody complained or pointed out any possible problems means that it was a non-issue
So you admit you have no knowledge of this, yet assume it fucks the public to have it moved a few feet to the left?
We also don't know if the entire story is real. We don't know why you are so triggered by it.
Your defense is entirely based on speculation that makes your side look correct, when you simply made it up out of thin air. That is not a legitimate position.
I know that street, the bus is like 10 meters away from it's original location. it inconveniences literally no one.
you suck
Seems like it benefited everyone involved, even those that don't know they benefit from it.
I wonder what problem the original sign addressed. Because forbidding turning right for 2 ½ hours every morning sounds extremely specific, and sounds like one neighbor in particular had some beef with another or something, and got the city to put up the sign.
And maybe that neighbor left, or whichever problem was being addressed didn't exist anymore.
I know that's a thing because a long time ago, we had a "15mph - blind children at play" sign in our street, until someone pointed out that the blind child in question was now an adult and had moved out years ago, and the sign was just annoying everybody for nothing 🙂
In other words, the guy might have replaced a useless sign with another, equally useless one on his own dime. Maybe he could simply have called the city to wonder what the sign was for, and possibly have it reviewed and removed altogether.
Given the original sign covered 7-9.30am seems like it's to prevent people cutting across traffic during peak commuting time either to prevent accidents or improve the flow of traffic.
Yeah true. But I reckon it was worth asking.
Also, sometimes, all it takes is asking a carve-out to make your life easier.
For instance, he could have asked the city to add an "except residents" sign under the existing one. At least where I live, you'd be surprised how accommodating the administration can be if you simply ask nicely with a good argument.
Hell, he could have added the sign himself for cheaper and I bet none of the other residents would have complained about it 🙂
Realllly depends on the city. Some places won’t even reply to you for months, and when they do it’ll be a bullshit answer because you’re not of the developers bribing them with millions of dollars…
There is a sign like this at the end of my street. It’s morning and evening rush times. The turn in question is an offset intersection through a busy road. If you are to take a left off my street you can easily be hit by someone taking a right from the street across into the middle of the road to then take a left from the perpendicular road onto my street. The city put some surveyors out there for a bit and with the accident data and all that determined my street can’t make our left at certain times but the street across can snake their way across town just fine. The 2 streets on either side of mine are just fine to left turn from, they don’t have the offset intersection. Nobody gets pulled over for the turn either but I’m sure if you caused an accident you would get an extra citation.
Also, kids on their way to school
There is a guy down the road that used to have someone riding down his street with a loud muffler and blaring music trying to hyped up for work every morning around 8:30 So instead of putting a sign up that said no turn between 8-9, he figured if he put up a sign that said 7-9:30 it would seem specific and no one would question it. They would all think it was curated by engineers and traffic studies. Nah, dude just wanted to sleep in because he worked nights.
7-9:30a Definitely speaks to it being rush-hour specific.
How can it be rush hour when it’s two and a half hours long?
It covered Rush Hour and a portion of Rush Hour 2. Not 3, because the city is no fun.
Perhaps that's done in the afternoon but OOP didn't mention it because it wasn't relelvant?
Maybe it wasn't obvious, but I was referring to the runtime of the Javkie Chan movies.
No apparently my comment wasn't obvious enough. I was attempting to imply that the afternoon rush hour traffic may have a similar restriction, during which Rush Hour 2 could be finished and Rush Hour 3 shown, but OOP didn't include whether such a restriction existed in the afternoon, as they would not typically be traveling by the same route in the afternoon, hence no need to change a presumably separate sign indicating the hypothetical afternoon/evening restriction.
Because the busy period in the morning and evening are more than 1 hour long about everywhere with people having differing work schedules that all begin and end within similar but not exact time frame.
You are asking a question, but it sounds like you are stating a fact. I don't know how to make sense of anything anymore?
I find it hard to believe you didn't understand the statement.
It's to try and prevent people from cutting through a neighborhood during rush hour. Common in more gridded cities.
Yes; also, I’ve seen it in more suburban areas, too, near a school as a way to protect the children from cars.
But my commute! You don't understand it's so long if I don't put school children at risk!
This is how I feel about OOP and people thinking it's hilarious how they messed with the sign.
I just see another entitled car brain who thinks they should be allowed to do whatever they like.
Feel you brother.
If you bring it up, then it could end up in some bureaucratic limbo where nothing ever gets done. And then afterwards if you go to change it yourself they’ll figure it was you. So maybe easier just to change it yourself in the first place?
There's a sign by my house, on a road I need to turn right on at about 420 every day, that says no right-on-red turns between 730am to 430pm on school days.
It's frustrating, because it doesn't seem like it's actually protecting children for 9 hours a day
Sounds like you should find a fun 10-minute activity to start at 4:20.
His sign wasn't useless, the new one was about 20% less useless.
Seriously, do people just hit "save" or "post" without even glancing at what they wrote?
Now you're making me self-conscious about my ninja edit rates.
No tmie!
School kids probably
Maybe he caused a 50-car pileup and killed hundreds of puppies.
I had one of those by my house, not in the residential area.
Morning turners would back up the lane into another light, so the sign was just to cover up for bad traffic design
Are people really praising this? I guess fuck the engineers who did a traffic study, and fuck the school children walking in that area from 7-7:30 I guess.
Just because a traffic engineer has qualifications doesn't necessarily guarantee they're not an asshole who is wrong and also sucks.
Title text is great
to be fair on traffic engineers timing lights we have verifiable proof that sometimes adding roads can actually increase taffic (and that removing them can decrease it) And this information is not always taken into account on a high level so they get stuck trying to fix an innately flawed system.
Or, hear me out, maybe the sign was just wrong. If they haven't catch up in almost a year that was probably the case.
I’m willing to hear you out. Your evidence for the sign being “wrong” is that it wasn’t discovered? Do you think that city workers would check to make sure the sign still said 07:00 and not 07:30? Why in the world would they check things like this?
Imagine you take out a good made stop sign. You'd probably have a lot of crashes in a short period of time and soon it would be discovered that something is wrong.
Apparently it hasn't happened, so it doesn't seem to be causing a lot of trouble.
The sign is there for a reason. If after modification that reason has not manifest itself, most likely the modification is within the margin of what the people who is regulating traffic want to happen.
Not everything needs to be on the same scale of safety. I’m not saying that this particular rule was 100% perfect, just that it’s not up to individuals to undermine them arbitrarily, and just because no one noticed in ten years does not mean that it was ok to do it.
I’m glad it’s not causing a lot of trouble anyway…
Ok cool so I guess OP is a civil engineer with a Professional Engineer license then, and got a resolution from the city/town's governing board giving them permission to change it. And they publicly bid the project to certified contractors.
Oh wait no, none of that happened
Did you just invent a school zone to make an argument? What would the hypothetical civil engineers have to say after running countless hours of simulations on imagined children?
You're right, illegally changing a public sign on a public road in order to make your own commute marginally shorter is absolutely just totally cool, and you would know because you "work for the government".
Never said it was cool. It's not cool to make shit up to support an argument.
I worked for the government. I had a six month contract with Department of Justice on the massive influx of files shortly after red light cameras went up in our area. I filed traffic tickets, too.
One file that stuck with me was a commuter who accrued multiple speeding tickets over a few days in an area I knew well, because it transitioned from the highway to a residential area in like, no time, and the RCMP had set up a speed trap before the new speed sign. It's not clear it's residential because it's a forest on one side with a huge hill between the road and the houses on the other. He went to court to ask for a sign to be put up closer to the highway or the speed trap to be moved up the road. They didn't do either.
It’s nice to see a few folks pushing back. This whole thing has the narrative of the ol’ incompetent state with its endless red tape and arbitrary nonsense!
Sometimes those things are true and it can be a pain, but it’s the same reason we don’t go out for vigilante justice. It wasn’t arbitrarily installed and no one noticed it because there’s no reason to check things like that.
There's totally a reason to check things like that. If there were any accidents or reports of issues it would be investigated. If it was a common hazard, cops might even set up a trap to catch cars making illegal turns.
To check to make sure signs that look identical don’t have the numbers altered? Sure, I guess.
We have no idea why the sign was the way it was. They gave us no background. So I'm biased against the sign changer until given a good argument as to why it was acceptable.
I'm biased because I've worked for the government.
Which government? Makes a big difference since some other better than others.
I'm not saying OOP definitely had no legitimate reason to change the sign, but without knowing, we can't assume they did either.
The fact they made no mention of it, leads me to suspect it was mostly for their personal convenience.
Also, government = inefficient is some neo-lib propaganda I can't tolerate. Any organisation can be inefficient (so, so, so many examples of this in the private sector), and governments can and must be set up to be well-run. The alternative is the privatised neo-lib hellscape we (countries in general) continue to not fix.
Uh... all I said was that I worked for the government. You're just making up your own little world over there, aren't you? This argument is moot since I can't anticipate everything you're gonna think up in imagination land. Kinda hard to argue against things no one said.
They used lib pejoratively, they already live in their head.
From your username I can tell you're a person of facts.
The lib thing is such a weird lemmy meme. Like tankies, they're responsible for everything wrong in the feed.
Fucking lol
absolutely… all the people praising this, like… those signs exist for traffic flow and safety… it’s so incredibly selfish to just say fuck everyone else, i need to turn right and even more selfish to avoid repercussions but making it “okay” for everyone else
maybe the sign was wrong, sure… but we don’t have that information… without more information, it’s an incredibly selfish act. dude has main character syndrome
Won’t someone please think of the children 😭
You're right, OP's ability to marginally shorten their commute is more important than public safety, and the times indicated on those signs are completely chosen at random so it doesn't matter anyway.
Good point.
How is life like being a lawful good little paladin? I break rules that don't apply to me. This guy seems to have broken rules that apply to no one.
You're the guy saying the victim should have complied with the cop that murdered him.
Guy did this in LA, correctly noting a lane on the 110 that goes to the 5 North.
Thank you, it was the first thing I thought and was about to go search for it
This is done in a number of overpasses on the DC beltway and “mixing bowl”
A road may go North while the other direction goes East and the signs will point that out but the road might actually be labeled South for a bit despite the sign saying East.
So folks have rappelled off the overpasses and painted EAST and an arrow or NORTH and an arrow in places like this.
And everyone clapped.
Difference here is that he was correctly a clear mistake. OOP here did it for their own selfish reasons
Did you know you can just rent a line painting tool and buy a high vis vest and hard hat?
You can just get all the things you need to make a bike lane.
Nobody will question you.
Be the change.
Unfortunately people just park on bike lanes, so there's no good damn point.
That means the road is too small and they are too close to the curb?
Well yeah because the road wasn't designed for a cycle line.
They should just build a second driveway damn assholes?
Just don't get caught.
Hi-vis vest, hardhat, and a clipboard(optional but stylish). You can do practically anything.
And if you have a ladder employees will literally hold the door open for you
Where meme?
Yeah, it's just life advice. No memes here
But why post this in c/memes then? There are better fitting communities.
None of the "memes" I see these days in "meme" communities are memes and it's honestly mildly annoying.
It’s all just twitter and Reddit posts. I hate the new internet.
I've noticed this trend with "You Laugh You Lose" videos as well (yes, people are still doing those). Oftentimes they're 50/50 neat facts and incredibly niche brainrot memes.
Because the mods in this community give zero fucks about what's posted. You're more likely to get comments removed for pointing out shitty posts than a shitty post will be pulled.
because it's one of the biggest communities and splitting everything up into 1000 sub-communities makes all of them too small to be interesting, and i'd rather have one big "haha that's funny" meme community than 1000 small specific communities
I see this post in my feed next
Hint: look at usernames.
The meme was posting things to make you ask where the meme is the whole time.
We have a road that goes under a bridge so that you can make a right to go east on a 4 lane road. People would sit at that corner waiting to go left and it caused massive backups. (Which made no sense, why go under the bridge then? Use a different corner and make a right to go west!). We asked the city to make it right turn only - they interpreted it slightly differently and thought we meant people were heading straight the wrong way up a one way, rather than turning to that corner, came and put a temporary sign. I went with one of my kids, wearing safety vests, and moved the temporary sign to the corner we wanted it at.
Later the city came and put the permanent sign where we had it, and ALSO changed the paint on the road to make it one way right at the corner and disallowed left turns INTO that corner, they just broadly said no left. Which is good. Nobody should be stopping at the bottom of a bridge to wait to make a left turn.
It's not like NOBODY does the left anymore, but there are not backups now because nobody is going to sit there waiting to go left, they get honked at.
🤔
In all fairness, he's discussing stuff he'd done 13 years prior.
And without enough info to point to a specific intersection.
Definitely past the statute of limitations.
"Oh shit, InfiniteRespect4757 just confessed to a crim on the Internet from years ago. We finally got em boys!"
One of my favorite modern day quotes recently has been:
"People really do be using their free will out here."
98% of the population believes everything they're told and obeys all the rules. It's that 2% you need to watch.
Not a meme
Looking to bulk order "pedestrian zone" and "cycles only" signs some time soon 👀
I have on numerous occasions considered ordering bike route signage to place up on bike safe routes. The city has official signs for it but puts basically none up. If I could just order a lot more to put up it could encourage more folks to join.
I'm French, so we have the standard European signs, which should be easy enough to order 👀
You don't have bike routes in France?
We do have them, but not enough of them 😈
Huh, that's a bit surprising to me. I moved from a small non-highway connected town last year, and there was a pedestrian and bike path the entire 32 kilometre way from that town to the bigger nearby city.
Wonder how many bike that distance. Honestly must be a really nice path to bike in the summer.
I'd say the problem is more bad bike paths than no bike paths.
Nowhere near as bad as in the US, but many places still have bike paths that just suddenly end, painted bike «gutters» on busy streets...
Overall it's pretty good, but quite inconsistent.
France, while still seeing progress, is heavily car-focused. You'll see car streets in cities that can barely fit an Aygo. I only know as a tourist, though, so it might be better in areas I haven't visited.
Now that's what I call first world anarchy
Remember that guy that made that highway exit sign in California? https://youtu.be/26-4oARwfF4
I get mine from tumbler and imgur
Just needs another “you can just do stuff” on top of it. We’ll be Facebook yet!
Flock is watching.
Flock is getting kicked out of towns left and right.
I've heard of like two places.
Yeah those are the left and right respectively
Sounds like two places to me.
I spent a weekend just filling all the potholes on my road. It wasn’t that expensive and it didn’t take long either. Turns out you can just do what you want
Thanks, Ron.
Respect.
I did a speed bump out of gravel and sprayfoam at 3am back a couple years ago. It worked ok for a couple weeks.
Where maymay
Stuck in traffic
My friends and I stole a speed limit sign over a decade ago and they still haven't replaced it.
They did replace the one on the other side of the road about 4 years ago.
20 years ago, our town had a war over an intersection.
Someone decided to upgrade a 3 way intersection, for a a dirt road going into the woods off a main artery. (rumored someone in town planning bought a house on that road and was trying to make it so they didnt have to wait a long time for a gap in traffic)
So they made it a 3 way stop unsteady of just the dirt road having a stop sign. This caused tragic to back up miles on either side, as it was pretty much the only stop on the main road going out to the town's comercial district (100s of work vehicles traveling it at 9 and 5)
Almost immediatley, People started coming out with chain saws, and wpuld cut down the 4x4 wood signpost. Leaving the stump and the concrete block in the ground. Fairly quickly, the town ran out of room on the narrow strip between the road and the bike path, and started hammering in metal posts, wedged between the buried cement supports.
Guys with welders on their trucks started cutting those down flush with the ground. At one point, a cop car was stationed there overnight.
The police report detailed 2 trucks, with chain strung between them, driving on either side of the post at speed, wrapping the sign, and tearing it out of the ground before dropping the chain.
Thst was about as far as it got before town meeting, where an inquest was called for into the appropriateness , and approval process, and who had put in the work order etc. (There was some passage about the planning board being able to make minor changes to signage, etc without impact studies, and going through the approval process (which includes open forum, and with enough detractors to a project can force it to be put to a vote)
The main point of contention being how anyone qualified to be in that position could think that something that caused a 30-60 minute delay on a 5 mile road qualified as a 'minor change'
Iirc the whole thing ended with the town cementing over that little strip (covering over all the metal and wood protrusions, and effectively signaling a stop sign couldn't be put there anymore) and then several members of the planing commision, resigning their posts, which made the inquest moot.
Diabolical
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
It's a single screenshot
That happened
What a savage
Peaceful activism doesn't exist. This guy 😀
Something like this has happened before.
This, specifically, did not happen.
How can you tell?
I can't be certain, but the level of detail just feels off. He specifies the number of bolts, but glosses over setting up an alias?
Having read the version of this story that's true, there's also a lot more to it than just "buying a sign from the supplier".
The way this is written is how I'd write it for a creative writing class. Possible I'm wrong, but I don't think I am.
My grandparents have a similar story (https://lemmy.world/post/40811218/21244723)
Real heroes don't wear capes
But they hold a screwdriver.
Relevant Superwog episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFR7EZEc-8I
This is a lie.
It's not that implausible; Richard Ankrom managed something similar (on an interstate no less).
I know it's not implausible, but the fabrication about contacting the company that had the contract to make the signs blew it all apart, the fonts are heavily controlled and copyrighted and they would lose the city contract if they got caught, no sign printing company is going to go out of business to make six bucks off some random dude.
Where funny?
No need to be funny. But it's also not a meme. Not that most things here are.
Mods are sleeping!
@[email protected]
@[email protected]
How is this a meme?
I see this. There was another thread today where people were discussing if stuff like this counts as a "meme" or if it's off topic for this page. I'll be making a pinned post for community input tomorrow about a potential new rule. Stay tuned.
been happenin for a while too
I seriously doubt it. Generally each city has their own sign-making department, if it's interstates, it's the state DOT doing it. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell signs that replicate them faithfully enough (including the reflective layer) to be swapped out - for exactly this reason. Otherwise this would happen all the time.
You can buy replicas of signs but they are usually a lot thinner aluminum and don't have the same layered reflective coating, and probably noticeably smaller too. That said, it is possible to buy the sign-making equipment and produce your own, if you were really so motivated, but now we're talking way more than a traffic ticket.
So just go take the sign down, so much simpler. Doubt they'd notice for a months or years, and when they replace it, just take it down again.
Any department of transportation isn't going to have their own print department, as far as I know. They contract out print jobs like that since the equipment and expertise to produce at scale are prohibitively expensive for just one client. As I've seen, that kind of job uses laser-etched plates on rollers with different plates for each colour. Pantone inks, probably. So they need the laser machine, a printer the size of a small apartment, the licensing, and all the materials, just for signs.
The reflective coating is just a simple laminated layer.
Source: Worked at a printers and toured a couple screenprinting shops who had contracts with the city. We'd print anything as long as someone paid and sent the correct filetype.
It's the same in Germany, I've been in a sign making factory and they will make signs for everyone who pays. The illegal part is not owning them, the only illegal part would be putting them up on public streets without authorization. You are definetly allowed to use these signs on your own private ground, on a private parking lot for example.
Because of this, I looked into whether the Canadian governments and municipalities had some kind of copyright, but couldn't find anything except laws against interfering with traffic. Enforcing a ban on making your own signs would be way more tedius than just saying "Don't fuck with traffic" anyway.
And yeah, you're right, there are signs like those all over private lots and around businesses. There's nothing special about the government ones.