What's in a name?
Page 27
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
TMAGE-BUILDING and name-dropping are highly rated arts in these days. Highly rated too are the High Streets up and down the country where much of the nation's trade is carried on.
How odd it is, therefore, that the authorities who have High Streets—and all the other streets—under their care, seem so reticent about the appearance of street nameplates.
Yet how much depends on them and how many journeys in highly developed countries such as this start and end in streets both for passengers and goods. And with 14m. goods vehicles on the roads they cannot all be 4riven by staff with the necessary local knowledge.
As a long-term project, off-the-street loading and unloading is commendable, but the most enthusiastic will agree that it is a long-term project, at least if it is to be universally applied. Meanwhile for the rest of this century at least, it seems that lots of goods vehicles will continue to occupy highly rated stands in urban areas while they are being loaded or unloaded. But at least in so doing they will be providing an economic service to trade and industry.
How non-productive to all concerned, however, is it for the same vehicle to be occupying the same expen;ive space while the driver involved makes desperate attempts to locate a particular address to which he has to deliver. It is therefore topical and pertinent that the highways and vehicles committee of the Road Haulage Association should recently have made strong recommendation to the Ministry of Transport on the inadequacy of traffic signs in towns.
While direction signs on motorways have been improved and there is a general improvement in main direction signs, the committee stresses that there is a serious need for street nameplates to be reviewed to ascertain whether they are large enough, whether they should be illuminated or resited or otherwise improved. As everyone will agree, under modern traffic conditions in towns it is becoming near impossible and certainly a highly dangerous exercise to stop in the High Street and ask for a direction.
There is a need too for adequate repetition of nameplates in long streets for the benefit of those who enter them midway, while many nameplates that do exist are placed too high to be observed from the modern vehicle.
In contrast to long-term million-pound projects, improving street nameplates is a job that can and should be done now.