UK vs. Ireland

We'll start at the bottom of the roads hierarchy, on an unclassified road near Bray, Co Wicklow. The sign to the right is at a T junction near the N11, hence the "The Southeast" control city. Note that all destinations are in Irish and English, with the Irish language version in a modified italic Transport font. This sign is unusual in that it is close to a primary route, yet doesn't give any indication of this. Normally you'd expect to see a (N11) in there somewhere. As with the UK, parentheses around a route number indicates "to this route".

Here we have a typical direction sign for a roundabout on an unclassified road. On many unclassified and regional routes the direction signage can be quite poor. The reason for the fairly high standard here is because of recent road realignments due to the construction of the M50 motorway.

Next up from unclassified roads are the regional routes. This sign, on the R118 near Dun Laoghaire, gives local destinations to the right and Dun Laoghaire (pronounced "done leery") straight on. Dun Laoghaire is a ferry port, with a high speed catamaran taking sailing four times daily to Holyhead in Wales. Note the car ferry pictogram on the sign. Dun Laoghaire is written the same way in Irish and English, so no English translation is shown.

An exception to the requirement to have bilingual signs is in the few remaining areas of the country where Irish is still spoken (the Gaeltacht). Here signs are usually only given in Irish. This masterpiece of a sign is located just outside Dingle (An Daingean) in Co Kerry. Doesn't the capital A look odd like that? I'm not sure why they bothered with it - it looks even less like an Irish A than the standard Roman one does!

On national primary routes, direction signage is supposed to be of a high standard. Here's an advance sign for a junction on the newly-upgraded section of the N11 between Kilmacanogue and Glen of the Downs, south of Bray. Note the Guildford Rules-style patching for the R762, a regional route so therefore on a white background. Even though the road is now open as a dual carriageway, the road works speed limit of 40 mph still applies. When the local authority get around to it, a bye-law will probably be passed to increase the limit to 60 mph. In the mean time, the Garda (Irish police) were setting up a laser speed camera just before this sign; the 40 mph limit was being universally ignored!

A combined route confirmation and distance sign. Practice here is almost identical to that in the UK, with similar signs being placed after major intersections. The main difference here is the billingual destinations and the fact that the distances are in km rather than miles. Rosslare is on the N25 south of Wexford (where the N11 terminates), hence the parenthesis, meaning "get to this town via the N11, but expect to turn off at some stage as the town isn't on the N11 itself".

Get in lane! The left two lanes are for the N11 northbound to Dublin, the right hand one to take a U-turn south and to go to the ferry port of Dun Laoghaire. The project to grade separate this junction is now almost complete, so this sign and the traffic signals to its left will not be long for this world.

Note the typically hard-to-read temporary direction sign stuck below the main one.

This sign is about ten years old, and starting to look a little battered. Strictly speaking, both "The Southeast" and "Bray" control cities should be on a blue patch, as well as the M11 route number itself. Some local authorities haven't quite got the hang of this patching thing! Note the black on yellow diamond warning sign for the roundabout. As you can probably guess from the red and white temporary "Jersey barriers" and somewhat random lane markings, this road is currently undergoing reconstruction as part of a project to grade-separate a nearby junction.

At least they got it right at the other end of the motorway. Here the N11 dual carriageway runs end-on into the M11, a motorway by-pass of Bray. The M11 probably qualifies as a pathetic motorway, it's only about 10 km long and has just one intermediate junction (not shown on the Multimap.com map). It's connected to dual carriageways at each end but there are no plans to upgrade these or any other part of the N11 to motorway standard anytime soon. Makes you wonder why they bothered with motorway restrictions for just this small section.

A typical motorway direction sign. The normal sequence is a smaller advance warning sign placed 1 km before the junction, then a sign like this 500 metres out, followed by countdown markers at 300, 200, and 100 metres. Overhead gantries are unusual on Irish roads, with authorities preferring cheaper signs such as this one. This is the on the M11 southbound, before the only intermediate interchange on the stretch of motorway. Note the lack of an exit number, too. With the exception of the M50, Dublin's western bypass, exits on Irish motorways aren't usually numbered. The bollards on the hard shoulder are because of construction of the M50/M11 interchange. Note the solid yellow hard shoulder - on non-motorways the hard shoulder (if any) is a broken yellow line.

Direction signage at the gore of the exit. By the time you're close enough to read these signs it's far too late to actually take the exit if you're not already in the exit lane, so I'm not sure why they bother. I guess if you are in the exit lane they provide some reassurance.

Here we're approaching the northern terminus of the M11, at a roundabout. Note the roadworks warning signs have orange backgrounds rather than the normal yellow. You can just make out a matrix display in the centre reservation. It used to flash "Reduce Speed", but hasn't worked for a number of years now.

Far from the new world, some black-on-yellow diamonds. That's a sticker for a BMW garage on the right-most sign.