For him, the scenario is written in advance. “Imagine, you are on a busy road and want to turn left, onto a small path, on which you have no visibility. Quickly, you slip between two cars and, there, you come face to face with this thing. Putting a sign like that, in the middle of the road, is dangerous and absurd,” complains a Lausanne resident, who discovered on returning from vacation that a 30 km/h sign had been planted near his home.
The Vaudois in no way deplores the new speed limit, on the contrary, he supports it. “The road is not wide, but it is two-way and there are cars parking in the boxes. Often, you have to zigzag, so it’s better not to drive fast,” he describes. What bothers him, however, is the dangerousness of the new development. “We are a few steps from a Y intersection. I don’t give this sign more than a few weeks or months for someone to run into it.”
Patrick Étournaud, head of the Mobility and Public Spaces Development Department, believes for his part that: “The signaling totem respects the standards, including the creation of a lateral recess to highlight the entry into the zone 30, and does not generate any security issues.” In view of the images, the City nevertheless concedes that, visually, the whole thing may be surprising, “because the space dedicated to pedestrians is defined by ground markings and not a sidewalk.”
Move around, it's weird, but there's nothing to see, then. The most comical thing in the story is that a sign already exists, a few meters from the new signage. It provides almost the same information, but it's stationed on the side of the road and doesn't bother anyone. “It would still have been simpler to add the 30 km/h on top, instead of creating problems where there were none,” believes our Lausanne resident.
