Traffic-Calming: It's Everywhere

Reblogged this on The St Louis Contrarian.

Christ, that’s ugly. Here’s something we don’t talk about much—signage. Motoring has littered our streetscapes with an astounding number of metal poles with ugly signs on them. The sheer amount of visual noise is astounding.
When we look at traditional village streets or paintings of old towns, we often find them beautiful in a way no city street today can match. I don’t think the buildings are much less attractive—in fact I think a mediæval poet would be transported by those glass-clad towers we’re so blasé about. It’s not variety versus monotony, either—Greek fishing villages are totally monotonous collections of white boxes, and totally beautiful.
No, it’s not our buildings—it’s the clutter and ugliness and pettifogging control-freak nonsense of all the signs intended to control the behaviour of motorists. Take out the parking meters, parking signs, speed limit signs, stop and yield signs, and all the rest, and think of how much prettier and more humane our cities would become. Take out the advertising and you have something close to heaven.
The signage is probably essential for safety, I know, but it’s not the pedestrians or cyclists who need to be told how to pass one another without colliding. All that crap is there to keep motorists in line. It’s motoring that’s behind practically every ugly aspect of modern cities. They’re cleaner, safer, better-smelling, and far more commodious in every way—except for the the car. A hundred years from now, people will wonder how we ever tolerated it.