Humans Don’t Get Necks But Animals Do: Cold Start

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If you were an alien in a spaceship orbiting Earth, and via a peculiarity of your alien species’ information technology, the only human document you could intercept and read was the Manual on Uniform Control Devices for Streets and Highways, 2009 Edition, and you used the page about non-vehicular warning signs to get a sense of the sorts of lifeforms that populate the planet, I think you’d get a really skewed view of things.

Even if you can comprehend the idea of a silhouette, the disparity in the way animals and humans are represented is too great, and while we, as humans, understand this implicity, the aliens may not, thinking Earth is full of complex zoological life that’s intermixed with a society of robots that use anti-gravity tech to support their perfectly spherical heads.

I guess there’s no way to stylize these animals effectively and have them retain their distinctive looks, like we have with people? Also, it kind of makes me wonder why we need to, say, differentiate between a moose and a bighorn sheep or donkey or bear on these signs; wouldn’t a generic beast icon that just means “big animals here” do the job as well? We don’t differentiate the types of people that may be crossing a street (there’s no PhDs or baking hobbyists or part-time models crossing signs, after all) so why do we do that with animals?

You’re not likely to be on a different kind of alert for a sheep than a cow, are you? I mean, maybe? Horses are certainly faster, and bears are scarier, so perhaps there are reasons? And elk sure are pointy.

Also, I bet the aliens would be really baffled by the handicapped person icon. Why does that robot have such a big ass, they’re probably wondering.

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Mercedes Streeter

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61 thoughts on “Humans Don’t Get Necks But Animals Do: Cold Start”

  2. A long time ago I spotted a billboard (that is a type of sign, right?) that read, “This sign don’t say nuthin’!”.
    About the time your brain grasped what it said, and you settled down, another one appeared that read, “This sign STILL don’t say nuthin’!”.

  5. “I bet the aliens would be really baffled by the handicapped person icon.”
    Just wait till they get to W15-1, it baffles me that it’s still used so commonly.
    Do seesaws still exist? Do teenagers in driver’s Ed understand that one?
    I think it’s time we retire W15-1 and replace it with a stick figure holding a phone in front of their face.

    Don’t even get me started on what the aliens would make of RW-130.

  7. “We don’t differentiate the types of people that may be crossing a street (there’s no PhDs or baking hobbyists or part-time models crossing signs, after all) ”

    Well maybe we should. Won’t someone think of the part-time models?! 😛

    “You’re not likely to be on a different kind of alert for a sheep than a cow, are you?”

    Actually, yes. Hitting a sheep is not great, but hitting a cow is likely to kill both your car and you. Ditto a moose (hence the moose test that Scandinavian group does).

    Also, there’s a meaningful difference between, say, a deer and a cow. A cow is probably not going to take a flying leap over a fence to dive in front of your car, but a deer might so you need to watch out for different things.

  9. “Non-Vehicular Warning Signs”

    Wouldn’t the snowmobile be considered a vehicle? Maybe even the wheel chair?

    Also, the snowmobiler needs to be depicted holding a beer.

  10. the traffic warning sign that always makes me. chuckle has no pictogram, it just says “BLIND DRIVE”, to which the voices in my head always reply “yeah yeah, and deaf sing….”.

  11. I am SO here for MUTCD content!

    One of my favorites are the signs New Mexico DOT has on I-10 that posits the existentialist hypothesis “Strong Winds May Exist”.

  13. …wouldn’t a generic beast icon that just means “big animals here” do the job as well?

    How you gonna drop a line like that in this article and not provide your illustration of a “Generic Beast Icon”?

  15. A weird one for me is to look at that first one—the basic “pedestrian crossing” sign—and try to see the person on the sign as anything other than male. What is the deal there? Am I picking up on subtle gender coding involving the set of the shoulders, the assertiveness of the stance, the leg-to-torso ratio? Is it just that I’ve been conditioned to view male as the default gender? What’s the deal there? It’s a pretty minimalist, stylized silhouette that could honestly easily be a person of any gender. It has no gender of its own since, y’know, it’s a stylized icon of a generic human and not an actual flesh-and-blood person. However, my mind stubbornly refuses to see it as anything but male. Is that just me, or what?

    1. You’ve been conditioned to view these types of signs as male and female due to the addition or subtraction of a skirt/dress.
      This has no skirt/dress, so it looks like the “man” on the bathroom signs.

      In reality, it could be anyone. It isn’t the 30s anymore, women are allowed to wear pants.

  16. Differentiating between animals: growing up rural, I damn sure do.
    Horses and deer are completely different beasts, with completely different activity schedules and all sorts of stuff. I see a “horse” sign, I’m not worried at night. I see a “deer” sign, I’m not worried during the day.

    That being said, at least around where I grew up, I don’t really need signs. So maybe its for tourists, but tourists aren’t gonna know when to be aware of the different schedules and just be paranoid at all times.

    Fuck man, I dunno.

    1. Where I live, they are taking out the deer crossing signs, because people ignore them, and the deer don’t always cross at the signs. We are told to expect deer to be anywhere and everywhere.

    2. I was thinking along similar lines.
      Most people wouldnt know how to interpret them, but so long as they prepare for *something* ahead i guess the signs are helping

  17. Is your vision ok Jason? Human necks must be a figment of your imagination because I’ve never seen a person with one. What would someone with a neck do while they were sleeping??? Just leave their head attached like some sort of savage?

    3. “We don’t differentiate the types of people that may be crossing a street”

      I mean, I can think of signs for general people, for elderly, for children, for disabled people, for road workers AND most notably disembodied legs

  20. There is a little beach town in New Jersey I visit that has 2 different duck crossing signs about 100 yards away from each other. I’ve always been baffled by that fact they are so close to each other and totally different signs. Never change Ocean Gate.

  22. And what about the robot riding the horse?

    Where I live, many years ago, some heroes with too much time on their hands modified dozens of deer crossing signs with round, red stickers on the noses.

  23. If drivers are on the alert for creatures that resemble those found on traffic signs, it could explain why pedestrian deaths are rising. Actual humans aren’t represented, so we just kind of blend into the environment. It’s either that or ginormous pick ups with bumpers that impact about head high on pedestrians.

    1. I’m on high alert for stick-figures. Haven’t seen a single one yet. Not in a wheelchair, not walking, not on a seesaw, not holding a flag, not shoveling, not attempting to grab a slightly-smaller dress-wearing stick figure that is slightly in front of them…

  24. The handicapped image is the only human that does have a neck. Are necks disabling? Is there something wrong with the antigravity that her spherical head must have settled directly on the body stick?

        1. It’s just your average non-conformist freethinker.

          “No, I’m not going to voter the way you to me to! And I’m not going to toe the line! You’ll never own my soul!”

    3. Not true! Unless you don’t consider farmers on tractors to be human. If you open the pdf Torch links to and go to FIG. 2C-10 on page 169 (labeled 129), sign W11-5 clearly shows a farmer sitting on a tractor with a neck. And a hat. A sort of strange hat in which the brim angles down in front and rises in the back. Kind of a fedora, but without the nice smooth transition. Besides, what farmers wear fedoras?!? That is more of a 40’s-50’s archetypal business man in a dark gray suit. But he is not a business man, He is a private dick, the protagonist in our noir story. He wants to do the right thing, but he lives in the seedy recesses of our society, drinks too much, slaps dames around when they get hysterical. But this is 1948, so its OK. But WTF is this guy doing on a tractor?!?!

      1. What I love about that sign (see my post below) is that it does appear to be a floppy stereotype hillbilly hat.

        I’m always surprised in our outrage-driven society that nobody’s gotten upset about this yet. Like how nobody’s angry that check engine lights often depict a non-catalytic-converted ’60s big block.

  25. This is so fun.
    Also 30 years ago, when doing a lot of driving around the country it seemed that the deer signs were different in different parts of the country.

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