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Comment by sealeck | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely don't see the harm of these things – I often think the issue is that lots of measures improve safety at the margins (e.g. if someone is drunk and stumbling down the stairs this announcement might help them) rather than on average. That is: many safety features will produce limited tangible benefit to the average person most of the time, but they do reduce accidents which normally happen at the tail end of the distribution in more extreme circumstances.

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Banner blindness. If 95% of safety signage is banal and useless to most people, then most people will simply stop paying attention to signage.

Putting up a sign is not a free action!

To be honest this is a general problem with the UK. Try driving on any major street and you'll realize it's plastered with mostly useless signs. A dozen warnings assault your senses at any one time, which makes it very difficult to pick out what is actually important. This is compounded by sometimes completely braindead implementation of rules. E.g. most bus lanes in London can be used by motorcyclists, but some cannot. There's no rhyme or reason, the entire thing is decided by a small blue sign at the start of a particular stretch which may or may not have an even smaller motorbike icon on it - among an icon for a bus, taxi and pushbike. Whoever thought this is a good idea is either a moron or deliberately wanted to extract fines from motorcyclists who accidentally use the wrong bus lane.

> To be honest this is a general problem with the UK

Hotel lifts would appear to be another example of this. Automated "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements seem to be present almost everywhere.

Presumably a significant number people suffer appaling crush injuries from lift doors in other countries ... or maybe they don't, and companies across the UK just let their Health and Safety conslutants get the upper hand.

...or visually impaired and thus use those announcements to understand what state the lift is in.

Lol yeah of all the examples to choose

Why are the pavements at crossings so bumpy?! It's political correctness gone mad!

> ...or visually impaired and thus use those announcements to understand what state the lift is in

...but only in lifts in the UK? No, that's not a credible hypothesis.

They’re not only in UK lifts and even if they were, that still wouldn’t change the intention of those announcements.

We have those in the US too but we use beeps. Some elevators do use speech so you'll hear "going up" sometimes.

Blind person here, I find the "doors closing" / "doors opening" announcements pretty tiresome, and I don't think they provide any benefit to us.

They sometimes even make things worse. Especially on bilingual elevators (not that uncommon in European countries where English isn't an official language), there are so many announcements that the elevator just can't keep up when there's a lot of traffic. I've seen a few elevators that were always a few announcements behind during periods of high activity.

The "lift (elevator) going up / down" announcements, on the other hand, are quite helpful, and I vastly prefer the European system than the American mess of ADA-compliant beeps.

Why is the American system a mess? One chime for up, two for down. It's simple and doesn't bother anybody.

(speaking as a person who isn't blind) The biggest omission seems to be that there is nothing to tell you what floor you've arrived at. This is probably fine for an empty elevator but as soon as it gets busy and there are 10s of floors I'd imagine it gets hard to navigate.

I agree. Trying to track it all can be distracting.

I'm sorry, but UK is positively devoid of road signs compared to some other countries lol, I've been driving here for well over a decade and it's really nice how few signs are here and it mostly relies on common sense.

Compare to your average road in Poland:

https://motofakty.pl/co-5-metrow-znak/ar/c4-16143839

67 road signs on a 360 metre long stretch of road - and to me, what's shown in the picture is very typical, especially in big cities. There are soooo many signs it's close to impossible to read all of them and still look at the road.

> Try driving on any major street and you'll realize it's plastered with mostly useless signs

This is not in line with my personal experience. Can you provide some examples of useless signs on typical roads in the UK?

The "tunnel ahead" sign always struck me as particularly pointless. Who needs that sign? Surely if you're driving towards a tunnel, the enormous tunnel itself is the indication you need that you're heading towards a tunnel?

Honourable mentions for "humps ahead".

Those are for truck drivers and those carrying dangerous goods The Blackwall Tunnel in London has those signs starting something like ten miles south (ie on the edge of the city!), to try an ensure such vehicles don’t reach the tunnel unwittingly and force it to be closed.

I mean the one they put directly in front of a tunnel, with the tunnel picture inside a red triangle. I live quite near Blackwall tunnel and haven’t seen it any of those on the approach. The ones you’re talking about are, I believe, red circles containing the actual restrictions which are, of course, fine.

Also strictly speaking, the restrictions, even if those red circles were combined with the tunnel warning, the tunnel warning is still irrelevant - you’d have to follow those restrictions whether or not there was a tunnel.

We have these in the US too because we have a ton of Semi's and big rigs. They can get stuck. Usually the signs include the clearance too, like 12'8".

There's some funny videos online of trucks getting a haircut from these. So seems necessary to me.

I saw myself doing this in realtime when visiting California for the first time. The initial shock of seeing signs that warned of cancer causing chemicals in buildings quickly faded when I realised they were on every building - soon becoming as blind to them as the locals.

Is it still not a free action if it replaced an ad?

That makes it literally not free - it was paid for with the opportunity cost of the ad.

At a society level, ads are paid for with the opportunity cost of other things that people could be thinking about, e.g. cancer-curing drugs. We can therefore say that ads cause cancer.

Additionally, the ones, whose ad-induced distraction would most benefit society, will not see these ads as they will likely not take the subway.

Both are at the cost of a generally more tranquil and quiet environment. I would take the most boring, crack-filled and grayest concrete wall over someone else’s messaging whether it is paid for or the agency’s own propaganda.

One of the reasons that people like many tourist destinations is that many tourist destinations forbid most outdoor advertising. It's subtle, probably many tourists don't even realize it, but it changes the entire feel of a place.

> I genuinely don't see the harm of these things [..] they do reduce accidents

It would be good to see actual data backing up this hypothesis.

The cynic in me says another equally plausible hypothesis would be that this is entirely about the owner/operator/landlord avoiding any legal responsibility for accidents than actually reducing the number of accidents.

My mother had a job coming up with such warnings. She was a 'home safety technician' for the local council, advising people not to fall off ladders and the like. It seems to work like there are statistics that so many people end up in hospital after falling of a ladder or whatever and the council thinks we must fix this, we'll hire someone to educate the public. The odd poster probably doesn't make much difference to the number of people falling but it was quite an easy and entertaining job for my mum.

Behold, the last man.

it's not so much "harmful" as it is a symptom of and also reinforcing a society mentality of immature and infantile irresponsibility. but one might also argue it is harming visual and acoustic silence by constantly announcing something and hanging signs everywhere.

You think stumbling drunk people are helped by signs and announcements?

Sometimes, probably yes? :)

I'd love to see the research that would substantiate that, from anecdotal evidence, stumbling drunks don't read or listen to anyone.

Ha ahahahahahah ha.

There is an art to the production of low cognitive load information systems, which, as somewhat of a bonus, have the side effect of being navigable even by the mentally impaired.

Don't believe it? Think about that credit card of yours. You can instigate the movement of money while so piss drunk you can't even walk! Amazing on how such care isn't put into other things.

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