FINAL THOUGHTS FROM SYENNA

Dear Reader,

Should you be visiting friends and family over the New Year, I suggest you keep away from the traffic island depicted below. Let me imagine a scenario…

• you have never been here before and your Voice of Doom Satnav insists you take the first exit; • it is dark and wet; • if you spend more than 10 seconds trying to decode the sign you will hit a bicycle, e-scooter, pedestrian, or taxi; • being a 24-hour clock person, you spend 5 seconds trying to process the time slot information; • then another 5 seconds trying to find the clock on the car infotainment system (which moves the clock depending on what apps you have running) [Ed: the purpose of a private vehicle is to provide a mobile structure onto which you can mount your social media experience]; • then another 5 seconds figuring out whether or not it’s Sunday (speaking for myself here) • now you have to work out whether or not you’re allowed to take the 1st exit o If I’m driving a car or motorbike I can’t do that unless I’m also a local bus; o What if I’m driving a van, motorhome, bicycle, or e-scooter and I’m not a local bus? • by which time you have done one of the following: o crashed; o taken the 2nd exit (which you didn’t want); o taken the 1st exit and been snapped by the carefully-placed automatic traffic camera; o done a U-turn round the island and gone back home.

Conclusions 1) the purpose of the road sign, which is to earn the local council £1M in traffic penalties, has reportedly been achieved several times over; 2) it is not necessarily the case that a sequential life cycle model is a good choice for a road sign acquisition project [Ed: a sequential approach may be the optimum if the problem and solution are both well-understood]