Highland Council’s Gaelic Committee wants to increase the Gaelic signage on the A82, A9 and A96 and has asked Transport Minister, Stewart Stevenson to put bilingual signs on these three roads.
Mr Stevenson has committed himself to a review of the impact of the Gaelic signage already installed and wants to wait for this as the foundation for whatever decisions are to follow.
The Gaelic Committee has asked Mr Stevenson not to make the review an obstruction to the development of Gaelic signage.
With the review report not expected until 2011, the Scottish Government has now said it is looking at speeding up the review procedure.
The problem with this is that stable conclusions do depend on a long enough data stream for average patterns to be clearly manifest.
The Gaelic Committee wants to see the language made present more often to more people. Road signage is a potent instrument for this.
There is no doubt that Gaelic signage is an important cultural locator. It also acts as a clarifier of its English parallel and a guide to the proper pronunciation of the English name.
Take ‘Tyndrum’ as an example. A lot of people wrongly pronounce this ‘Tin Drum’. On the bilingual signs the Gaelic ‘Taigh an Druim’ appears beside the English ‘Tyndrum’ and two things are immediately clear. It can’t sound like ‘Tin Drum’ and its location makes sense of its meaning.
It is being said that people spend longer looking at bilingual road signs than they do those in a single language. This is seen as a potential road safety factor, hence the Minister’s interest in the review’s eventual conclusions.
This concern would carry more theoretical weight if our road signage was already intelligent, safe and consistent and not corrupted with a certain focus on its earning capacity.
For example, anyone using the M8 between the Erskine Bridge and the Kingston Bridge – the major motorway through Scotland’s central belt – expecting a 70mph through run, can unknowingly break the speed limit.
This changes bewilderingly often, sometimes down to unexpectedly low speeds – and usually appearing on lollipop-high signs on the left hand side of the inside lane, masked absolutely by high sided vehicles frequently travelling this through-route.
The result is revenue generation for Strathclyde Police in speeding fines – and paranoid once-bitten motorists in outside lanes afraid to take their eyes off the inside verges, far from ready to react to developments ahead. This is a real danger to road safety.
Our signage is also distractingly inconsistent. A destination named on one sign is often totally absent from the next sign encountered, leaving drivers dangerously indecisive at key junctions.
Bilingual signage is far less of a hazard than any of these general features of our signage and much safer than the blizzard of road signs and over-bright reflectors to which we subject motorists.
Let’s have an overall review of the efficiency and safety of our current signage procedure and let bilingual signage go ahead without interruption.