Driving in North America

I recently started learning to drive in Canada and wanted to share some thoughts about American standards — specifically road signs.

Canada and the USA use the same signs and standards, which, by the way, are no longer used anywhere else in the world.

Let’s compare. This is what a highway looks like in the EU:

This is how it looks in Canada.

But since everything here is on a larger scale, in reality you see it more like this.

What’s especially annoying is that speed limit signs are often very small, especially relative to the scale of the roads.

This is what a speed limit sign looks like. They're usually placed as far to the right as possible — hard to notice.

Again, in Europe, where the roads are smaller, the signs are usually bigger and much more visible.

Same thing — on these narrow two-lane roads in the EU, the signs are giant and easy to read.

A separate pain point for me is the lane direction arrows. I don’t know why they chose black for them, but it’s absolutely ****

They’re hard to see, often placed far from the road, and very often just not there at all.

They’re mounted close to intersections, at the last second before a turn.

On major roads it looks like a joke.

For comparison, here’s how it looks in Europe:

Blue, high-contrast, clearly visible.

Here’s another fun fact — in Canada, in the French-speaking province of Quebec and other French areas, they actually translated the stop sign))

In conclusion: in my opinion, the American road sign and highway standard is terrible, unsafe, and exists just to be *not* like Europe or the rest of the world.