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Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Driving around America, you'll see they have these brown background signs telling you about museums and parks and stuff like that. We often stop by these to just take a look and it blows my mind how rich this country is that some random little lake somewhere will have a full blown parking lot and restroom and will look spick and span. There'll be a couple of those standard-issue picnic tables and standard-issue signboards describing the place.

I really love these random stops.

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I think the brown signs for "sights" which are the same shape as road directions are kinda standardized? I've been seeing them in Europe for decades too.

These ones with more detailed drawings are less common, but I've also seen them in multiple countries (at least my home town in Italy and some cities in Hungary have them).

Absolutely. But France may well have been the first country to have them.

indeed, especially since TFA says they're 50 years old :)

Have you moved to the US from somewhere else that doesn't have anything like that? I'm more interested in how that works tbh, because this also seems normal to me (UK) – if there's some natural attraction like woods or a lake or whatever are you just not allowed to see it? Or you are, you can freely roam, but just it's on you to figure out how to get there/what to do with your car etc.? Or would it just not be publicly owned land anyway so previous questions are irrelevant?

Even if it's public land, you usually need a permit (though an America the Beautiful Pass is not that expensive and covers almost all federally-owned land).

However, the point was about the signs. You can find quite a lot of neat little things that you otherwise would have no easy way of discovering.

Texas has a bunch of state historical markers along even minor routes. They can be hard to catch at speed (most TX highways have a 70 MPH speed limit, even small ones), but there's typically a space where you can pull over and read it.

I grew up in India. I’m told it’s different now so I’ll just say that I haven’t lived there in decades and my experience was that you would not routinely have a nice parking lot on a paved road that led to a nice viewpoint. You could get there but there is no guarantee of the safe path unless you knew a local and if you went from point A to point B you didn’t have signs pointing out things of significance.

The extensive network of well-signposted trails and so on that I’m now used to were not a common feature of my life there. For what it’s worth, I did have experiences there that one doesn’t routinely have here that were nonetheless an educational part of my life.

> how rich this country is that some random little lake somewhere will have a full blown parking lot

Aren't the parking spaces required by law, instead of "because we're rich"? I don't know, but I just watched the latest Not Just Bikes video, where he mentions legal requirements for stores to provide lots of parking spaces, which makes everything more expensive.

Parking minimums are implemented during building permitting. Natural lakes don't have building permits, and the parking is often constructed by the state.

American natural parks' restrooms will look spick and span?

That wasn't my experience in California and Nevada as a tourist from Europe.

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