Photo: How to quickly and effectively remember road signs (Getty Images) Author: Konstantin Shirokun
The traffic rules contain almost three hundred road signs, and an inexperienced driving school student is initially surprised – how can you learn them all to the last one? It is possible, if you approach the matter creatively.
Read about several traffic rules tips that are useful not only for novice drivers in the RBC-Ukraine article.
There are countries where there are practically no road signs in our understanding – drivers receive all driving instructions in the form of short inscriptions on signs.
But about half of the world's countries – including Ukraine – live according to the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals of 1968. Which provides for 8 groups of signs:
- Warning signs
- Priority signs
- Prohibitory and restrictive signs
- Command signs
- Signs of special instructions
- Service signs
- Direction and information signs
- Additional signs.
It is clear that the authors of the Convention took care to make it easier for the driver to identify and remember these almost 300 signs.
- On the road, the signs themselves often give the driver a hint – the color, shape, content of the pictogram;
- Location of the sign on the ground;
- The location of the sign on the pole. If there are several signs on the pole, the most important ones are usually hung on top – that is, prohibiting ones.
Main differences between signs
To start with, to remember the most important signs, instructors advise dividing them by shape – triangular, round and rectangular.
- Round ones are the strictest. These are prohibitory and imperative signs, respectively with a red border and blue ones. That is, red ones prohibit the driver from doing something, and blue ones command. But what exactly – you will have to remember, because behind each symbol there are often a lot of nuances.
- Triangular – warning, they do not require anything, but communicate important things. We emphasize – we are talking about triangles with one corner up.
- Rectangular – a very tricky shape. Half of them are informational, which do not oblige to anything. But in this same format are made signs of special instructions, which instruct the driver, for example, to go only in one direction.
- Signs of unusual shape – hexagonal, triangular with the corner down, rectangular with the corners up/down (in the form of a rhombus). These are the main signs from the priority group, and they were made like this specifically so that they would attract more attention – including when viewed from the back.
In brief
It is really difficult to master the huge amount of information contained in the Road Traffic Regulations in a month or two of training at a driving school. Therefore, if you are still only planning your future training, you can already begin to study some materials. And you can start with the signs, because here you are unlikely to harm yourself by violating the teaching methodology. As mentioned above, start by studying the systematization of signs and plates, and then move on to memorizing each specific sign.
In preparing this article, the Traffic Rules of Ukraine and the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals of 08.10.1968 were used .
Let us recall that RBC-Ukraine recently reported why pedestrians are not always right.