This page serves only to provide a historical perspective of the plan to improve street signs in July of 1999.  To review the current plan, refer to Community - Street Signs

Making Sydney

A Navigator’s Paradise

How you can do something about missing street name signs, and more

Retired design engineer Len Alexander and Navigator's Paradise Trial instigator Beatrice Player with the Lifesaver sign emergency service authorities say they would like all over Sydney.  Len submitted the design after feedback showed the trialed sign was cluttered and had numbers too small to read at speed.

Click here for latest update (10 July, 2000) or Scroll to Latest Update near end.

12 July, 1999

Sydney motorists! How many times have you wept and gnashed your teeth searching for street name signs that weren’t there? Driven for blocks looking for the name of the street you were on, but only finding the names of the side streets you were passing ?

How many times a day do couriers, taxi drivers and the emergency services do the same?   No wonder we have road rage.

Other first-world countries, and other Australian cities, name both streets at every intersection, but in Sydney we do not. Next year Olympic visitors from all over the world will shake their heads at our third-world standards in this area, and that embarrasses me.

In recent years the RTA has made great improvements on our city’s arterial roads by including street name on their big green and white signs, and by hanging some street names from yardarms holding up traffic lights. But local councils are responsible for the much more numerous street name blades found on corners, and up to a quarter of those are missing. Not through vandalism, but because they were never there.  The Australian Standard says it is not necessary to name the major street at each intersection.  I believe this practice causes continual frustration, and that the Standard should be changed.

The Navigator’s Paradise trial. I want our 40 metropolitan councils to put up their missing signs. In 1996 I asked Hornsby Shire Council to use our Neighbourhood Watch area for a pilot project we could showcase to the other 39 councils and to all road users. Click here to see both sides of the flyer that explains the Navigator’s Paradise we jointly created and launched in August 1998. Over 2000 of these flyers were distributed during the 10-month trial.

Wedge notation. A significant part of the Navigator’s Paradise project was the development and trial of Wedge notation, a new, concise way of denoting property numbers on street name signs. When the emergency services requested these numbers on our trial signs, I found a lack of consistency in methods now used, and shortcomings in all of them. I devised the "Wedge" scheme, named after the symbol used to indicate the direction numbers run in, and the emergency services asked that it be trialed.

This scheme is so concise that a driver can respond safely within seconds. Its use is explained in SIGNS OF THE TIMES (the front side of our flyer) and the reasons for its development in FAQ, a list of Frequently Asked Questions compiled from early trial feedback. The publication Wedge Notation For Property Numbers On Street Name Signs is a thorough treatment of the scheme and comes with the Street Sign Pack available free for a stamped SAE from the post office address below.

Five requests. I began this campaign with one objective—to get Sydney’s councils to put up their missing street name signs. It has evolved into also specifying what should go on the signs. Other information can be included, at not much more expense, to make the signs really valuable navigational tools. Ones that can guide us in even heavy, fastmoving traffic with minimum stress.

Trial feedback showed strong support from the emergency services and from the public for all the following measures tested, so now I am asking councils for not just Item 1 below, but all five:

1. the naming of both/all streets at virtually every intersection
2. suburb name on at least one sign at every intersection
3. property numbers on virtually all signs
4. Wedge notation for those property numbers
5. where practical, property numbers on kerbs at every address, supplied by councils

With only a slight increase in budget over a period of years, these are within the means of any council that chooses to give them some priority. The great shame is that some councils are spending much money replacing serviceable signs with new, decorative ones when road users would be far better served if that money financed missing signs. Some new signs feature slogans and other non-navigational information when the same precious space could give us Items 2-4 above. We, the users of these signs, must tell councils what is important to us and what is not.

Please join this crusade. If you want even just one of the above five items, please:

About those Olympic visitors...wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of shaking their heads, they went home saying what a clever people we are, making a sprawling, unplanned city like Sydney easy to navigate? Even more importantly, wouldn’t it be good to permanently eliminate one of the most frequent causes of stress in our society for generations to come?

It might take 20 years, but Sydney can become a Navigator’s Paradise. But enough of us have to tell those responsible, now, that this is what we want.

Thanks for your help!

Phone: (02) 9876 5993 Fax: (02) 9876 5840 (International—replace 02 with +61 2)
Email: streetsigns@optusnet.com.au 
Postal Address: Street Signs, PO Box 134, Epping NSW 1710 (Australia)
Please send a business-size stamped SAE for your Street Sign Pack.

Page created - 27 July, 2001.  Page last updated - 14 August, 2006 15:08:48 +1000