The dumbest road sign — or not

I was 25 when I realized that every roadsign maker in the country was not, in fact, an idiot, and that if there was any idiot involved, it was actually me.

So think about all the road advisement signs you’ve seen. Curvy road, right turn only, whatever. Picture them in your mind. Almost every single one of them features a yellow background (orange if it’s a construction zone) with a black arrow/line/squiggle to indicate what you’re driving on. So if it’s a signal for a right turn, it’s a yellow background with a black arrow that goes up, then hooks a right. You know all this. Pretty straightforward.

But note that I said almost every single one of them. For years, I thought it was actually every single one of them, and that made me think signmakers were idiots. Because there’s an exception:

Imagine you’re in my brain. (I apologize for the clutter.) You believe that the black is the what-you-drive-on part of every sign. And you see this one. So the sign very clearly means you’re losing a lane. But if you’re hanging around in my brain, what you see is “this is a three-lane road, and the middle lane is ending, while the rightmost lane is shifting over to where the middle lane once was.” That’s obviously a ludicrous way to indicate a lane ending, but it does indicate that, so I spent the first 25 years of my life (or at whatever chunk of those 25 years that involved me being aware of road signs) thinking they just came up with a really stupid way to convey that information.

I criticized this sign for years. “Look how stupid this sign is,” I would say. “I don’t understand why they’re so stupid about it. Just indicate that the right lane is ending. Trying to pretend the middle lane is ending is dumb.” I would say it a lot. Nobody ever pointed out my stupidity, probably because no one in the world cares about things I care about. But rest assured, I complained about it, and if you spent any significant time with me (especially on the road) between, say, 2000 and 2009, you probably heard about it.

You, reading this now, probably understand where my stupidity came in. This one sign, amid all the bajillion different road signs we have, does not involve you driving on the black lines. This one sign has the part you drive on as the yellow part, and the black parts are the edges of the lanes. I was living in Kansas, driving through Topeka on my way to Kansas City. The interstate as it passes through Topeka gets real twisty and turny, and I saw that sign, and my brain started to go into its usual tirade (just to me, because I was alone, but tirades are tirades), and then there was the realization.

I’m still annoyed that this one sign, amid all the bajillion different road signs we have, has the car on the yellow part rather than the black part. I still think that’s dumb. But now at least, I think something is dumb without myself being dumb at the same time. It’s a small distinction, but it’s an important one.