Shanghai City road authority considers removing English content from traffic signboards

City road authority considers removing English content from traffic signboards

By Janet Zhang | August 22, 2016,

LOCAL authorities are canvassing opinions from local residents over the necessity to remove English road names on local traffic signboards. 

The poll was led by Shanghai Road Administration Bureau prior to their actions to create the city's new traffic signs standards in order to improve the service. 

Above: The city's current traffic signage that mostly has road or area names on them in both Chinese and English. Below: Road names in English would be removed from the traffic signage as suggested by road authority.

In Shanghai, most of the traffic signs have road or area names on them in both Chinese and English. But the English road names are mostly in Pinyin.  Wang Weifeng, the bureau’s division chief, said such English versions of road names are not quite useful, Wenhui Daily reported.

Once the English versions are deleted, there would be more room to enlarge the Chinese characters to make them more recognizable to the drivers and others, Wang said.

“Of course we will keep the English-Chinese traffic signs around some special areas, such as the tourism spots, CBD areas and some transport hubs,” Wang said.

The bureau said it would come up with a final decision whether to remove the English information completely or not from traffic signs based on the result of the poll and as well as suggestions from traffic experts.

Locals are invited to log onto the websitehttps://sojump.com/jq/9258608.aspx to give their vote. The website is in Chinese only. The poll ends on August 30.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/metro/society/City-road-authority-considers-removing-English-content-from-traffic-signboards/shdaily.shtml

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