There are a couple of warning signs near the marshes here which depict a frog! Not as impressive as an elephant, but then this is England.... [Linked Image]

DJK,
I agree that the yellow diamonds give better visibility. I'd gotten so used to them in the States that the first time I came over to Ireland it seemed strange to see familiar looking warning signs while having to drive on the left! I noticed that your traffic lights (the few that exist!) follow the American/French pattern of just going straight from red to green as well (UK lights go to red-&-amber for a short while before green). I take it from your comments that the conversion of signposts to kilometers is now complete. When I was there last there were still some of the old white posts marked in miles (I think I even saw a couple which still had T and L road numbers instead of N and R - I don't know when the latter were introduced, 1980s?).

One of my complaints about the UK/Euro signs is that some are very inconsistent and illogical. No left turn, no right turn, etc. show the appropriate action in a red circle, croseed through with a diagonal red bar. That makes sense. So why then, do the signs prohibiting some other things NOT have the red bar? (e.g. the sign for "no bicycles" just shows a bicycle inside a red circle - no diagonal cross through it).

Back to electricity: When I was a kid in the 1970s our distribution cabinets, sub-station enclosures and poles had simple red and white signs with wording such as "Danger - High Voltage" or "High Voltage - Keep out." These days, the yellow triangle and lightning bolt symbols are everywhere:
[Linked Image from members.aol.com]

(Taken from this thread. )

This one is quite restrained. Some of the new notices then go into a whole paragraph of smaller print underneath: "Touching or approaching this equipment may result in death or severe injury..." blah, blah, blah.

I wonder how much of this is caused by the dreaded "L" word.



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 01-05-2003).]