North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Rolling stock

No longer under wraps - the new metric traffic signs. Fairly complicated, eh?

I mentioned last year how it was impossible to use the train service to commute into Galway (from the east) because the first train didn’t arrive into the city until 10 in the morning. Well, finally, even Iarnrod Eireann seem to have noticed the traffic jams and introduced a commuter service. If you want, you can travel all the way from Athlone and get into Eyre Square by eight thirty, but most of the passengers will have got on in Athenry, foregoing the pleasures of sitting at roundabouts for an hour every day.

From January 20th, all traffic signs will be metric, as opposed to the mix'n'match system that we've had for the last few years. A lot of the signs are still covered in black plastic (I hope I haven't ruined the surprise for anyone) but the gale-force winds of the last week has revealed quite a few.

As usual, the announcement was greeted with plenty of whinging - judging by some of the comments on radio programmes, you'd swear that the signs were going to be written in Cyrillic or expressed as logarithms. And what about all the cars that don't have metric speedometers? Well, mine is one of them, and maybe it's just me, but I don't think it's going to take too long to figure out the conversions. Actually, thanks to Teutonic parsimony, mine doesn't even have all the speeds written on the dial (they were probably trying to save on paint). But somehow, somehow, I was able to figure out that the notch equidistant from the 20 and the 40 indicators on the dial stood for 30 miles an hour, and I could match my speed accordingly.

I think we'll cope.

UPDATE January 25th - The Western People this week has a story about an 80 km/h sign erected on a boreen (and cul-de-sac). They probably had one left over...

Posted by Monasette at January 16, 2005 01:17 AM