Hello, I'm Toycat, and yes, you really are about to watch a video all about stop signs
because for the longest time I thought stop signs were just an American thing,
because the only exposure I ever had to them was in the movies
where they'd say "you ran a stop sign back there"
So I assumed after seeing the same stop signs in many countries around Europe
that this was just a reference to the American ones,
because Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine all use the exact same stop sign even using the English word
in the Latin alphabet, despite neither of those things being widely used in any of those countries
So I decided to dig into it, and the reason for that is because stop signs around the world
are regulated to be the same by the UN's Vienna Convention on Stop Signs,
yeah, a real convention for stop signs, and the convention was signed
in the middle of The Cold War by all of these countries, which means the exact same stop sign
with the exact same English text is on the Russian stop signs as well,
something I find at least a little bit shocking, and the same convention actually regulates
the way traffic lights work around the world, that's why green, yellow, red is the universal system.
And it also specifies how road markings should be applied to the road, which is why white or yellow
is almost universally used to divide roads and to put other markings onto it.
Again, fascinating stuff but today we're not here to talk about all that general road convention stuff.
We're here to talk about stop signs, because there is an oddly specific amount of stop sign regultion
involved in this convention, because if specifies an exact sign down to the millimeter,
it specifies an exact color, and it also specifies the exact text that the sign should have
which is why we have a ubiquitous stop sign, and funnily enough this was actually based on
The United States's stop sign design of the time, however if we pull up the list of countries that signed
the Vienna Convention you'll notice how The United States is oddly missing,
which is again, a really strange thing because the US is really good at adopting worldwide standards
that are accepted by pretty much every single other major country, it shocked me that they wern't on the list.
But this is a really unique situation because most of the world is therefore obliged to have signs
like The United States, but excluding the US itself, the US can change it's stop sign design
to not look like it's own, but lots of other countries around the world literally cannot because of said convention.
So this was a pretty weird discovery in itself, but it gets more interesting as you read the regulations,
because the regulations have some variation to them, to cater to local languages.
Such as the word on the stop sign being allowed to be stop in English of the local language.
So a lot of countries around the world just pick the default stop sign but some countries will actually change it
So for instance, in a lot of Spanish and Portuguese speaking South America, you'll see this stop sign right here.
And just a funny fact about this photo, this was actually the very last picture I managed to get off my phone
before my phone was mugged off me in the Dominican Republic, so isn't that a fun or sad story.
But moving on, as well as seeing this stop sign in a lot of South America, a lot of Central American countries
despite speaking the same language, Spanish, will use this stop sign instead, and funnily enough,
Spain and Portugal, again, speaking Spanish and Portuguese respectively
will use the regular stop sign in English, which means that despite these countries all sharing a word for stop
they have three different stop signs with three different words on them.
So, another interesting example of the odd one out there is the fact that most of Europe uses the default English stop sign
with the big notable exception being Turkey, which uses their 'dur' sign instead
and I know you're not meant to say it that way, but I do know that one of the few links between
The Republic of China and The People's Republic of China, neither country really likes to acknowledge the other one
is that they both use the exact same stop sign that looks like this, and is pronounced 'ting' by the way
so the ting stop sign is one of the few things that unites these two countries.
So, one of the strangest examples of a stop sign probably comes from the Canadian province of Quebec,
So Quebec is also known as French Canada, because the French part of their identity is one of the things
that is most widely known about them, and also one of the things they enforce on pretty heavily to local businesses.
So for instance, you can't use pasta on a sign, it was recently pointed out because that's technically an Italian word
not a French one, there's a lot of fun examples about this, but I wanted to talk about
the fun examples of their stop signs because their stop signs actually have to say
both stop and arrêt, and this kind of makes sense if you're familiar with the idea
of the fact that Quebec is bilingual and you don't really understand too much about the French language
but funnily enough, stop is actually a French word too, you know, stop is an accepted French word,
which means that their stop signs actually just stay stop in two different languages
and this is used all over Quebec as a pretty common thing, so there you go.
So fun fact right there about the Quebec Language Police.
So as well as using stop signs to kind of divide people, they're also used sometimes
to kind of bridge gaps across communities, such as those in Israel and Palestine,
as you can probably imagine, little bit of a gap going on there.
All of the stop signs found in this country don't use language to divide,
but they simply have no language on them whatsoever, everyone can understand them because there is no language to understand.
Which sounds pretty cute even if it is a breach of the UN Convention, but whatever, let's talk about more breaches of it,
because in a lot of Native American reservations, the language on the stop signs will instead be a Native American one.
So, if you've ever seen a stop sign that looks like this, then you'll know what the reasoning behind that is.
But let's move on to the European equivalent of this because there is the controversial example of Irish stop signs.
So, Irish stop signs are of course labeled in English for the most part across the country
because if you don't know, Ireland if a country that speaks English with the vast majority,
around 1% of speakers are native Irish speakers, there is an Irish language, it's called Gaelic,
but it's mostly in decline, and there are some areas of the country which speak majority Irish as well.
So, you figure, easy solution is to either have stop signs across the whole country or to have
stop signs and then some Irish language signs in the Irish part of Ireland, again, that makes
sense I think, but the interesting thing is that there's a lot of Irish stop signs in areas that
don't have a majority Irish speaking population, it's something that's used for nationalism and stuff like that
and it's kind of interesting that you can use even a stop sign to promote some political ideology
or promote your political views, and I think that's pretty crazy, but it's not the only example
of where politics and stop signs overlap because as close to home as the UK, or as close to home for me
I know you live all around the world, but in the UK we actually have politics involved in every single stop sign in the UK.
Every single stop sign found across The United Kingdom has to be individually approved by the secretary of state for transport.
And because it has to be done manually, one by one, there aren't many stop signs across the UK as a result
which is why I thought they were such an American thing, which is why I don't run across them too much,
and which is why this whole video came to be, fun fact.
So, you might be wondering, if we don't have many stop signs in the UK, what do we do,
do we just crash, or do we just give up, or do we wait for the nearest stop sign and not have roads,
The simple answer is that we mostly use give way signs instead, which aren't the exact same thing
but they have a similar enough purpose, just without the always neccessary stop, and without
the therefore police interaction where they say "you ran a stop sign back there" because it's fine
to run a give way sign, as long as you have given way first.
So, let's move on to the last few examples of really weird implementations of stop signs,
because for instance, in America the school busses, the bright yellow ones you're all familiar with
actually have stop signs that are retractable on the sides of them, I found that wacky, because that
stop sign can be pulled out at any time, and stop both lanes of traffic which means that school busses are basically
stop signs that have the ability to move, and that's something not found elsewhere,
and also a lot of countries use their own unique design because they never signed the convention
and therefore just came up with their own example from scratch, and some of these are crazy interesting.
Like the Japan stop sign, the Bhutan stop sign, the Tonga stop sign, and the Pakistan one.
So, there you go, crazy stop sign designs, I want to also mention that although a lot of countries
didn't sign the convention, a lot of the countries that did also have stop signs that don't match it,
because these were from before the convention was signed.
So for instance, Australia had a lot of stop signs before, you know, this 1960 convention
which means that if you look around the country, you might just find stop signs that look like this.
Okay, they actually look like this but still, my point stands, you know, they're wacky, they're different,
and they're not how you would expect them to be, and I think that kind of just, you know,
ends today's point about stop signs, that stop signs seem like something that is so simple,
but there is such a complex history behind them, and so many different things in human society has
that layer on layer on layer built for something as simple as stop signs,
because bear in mind, stop signs were meant to be a stop gap measure,
because they tend to be less effective than pretty much any other option.
They waste more time, they waste more lives, and long story short is that stop signs are a pretty
terrible stop gap that have evolved their whole history of their own, and that
have turned into a seven and a half minute video, which you apparently watched all of.
So who's at fault here, you or the stop sign, or maybe all of us really
but, yeah my point is that society is complex, that we evolve all of these different things,
and although you can't know about everything in the world, the fact that there is so much
to dive into for anything teaches you that there is a reason to be an expert on a particular thing
and now, and because you've watched this video, I'll give you the certified qualification that you are the expert on stop signs.
So, to kind of sum up here, stop signs are one of the few things that we all collectively agreed on as humanity
all those years ago, except we never actually agreed on them as humanity all those years ago,
which means we have this incomplete measure where we don't really understand where we stand
which just so happens to be the exact situation that Antarctica is in,
so why can't we all just work it out guys, why can't we just all stop we're doing
Anyway, hope you all enjoyed the video, second channel, don't care. Bye.
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