road signs

when i was 6 or 7 I saw a sign that said "No Outlets" I thought that meant that there were no electrical outlets on the whole street!

Laura.

A girlfriend of mine believed that the "All Way" sign below a "Stop" sign meant that this time they really wanted you to stop all the way...I don't think she appreciated my reaction...:-)

NotNull

I used to believe that "DEAD END: signs meaned it was the end of the world and you would fall off completely

Kristin

I used to believe that "No outlet" signes meant that that street didn't have any electrical outlets. This was a warning for anyone wanting to move into that area.

Brieness

In the rural area where my father lived when I was a young child, the areas of the road where the solid yellow center stripe indicated that it is was unsafe to pass the car in front of you were also marked by signs that declared DO NOT PASS. When I got old enough to read I was horrified to think that we were breaking the law over and over by passing these signs that clearly forbade it, but how else are you supposed to get where you're going?

ZiZak

I use to think that when you say a "one-way" stree sign you had to follow it.

Ron

I used to believe that the "watch for fallen rock" signs were about an old indian chief who got lost from his tribe and when we were driving through those fallen rock zones we had to look for him....Lee Rose Kentucky

Anon

I thought the 'no u-turns'sign meant 'no horses allowed on the road'..

Anon

when i was a kid i thought that there were people in the traffic lights and they would shine flashlights out the correct whole at the same time

JIllieJ

As a child, I grasped the notion of stop signs indicating that you should stop. However, I was confused as to how you know when to go again. Of course, my older sis gave me the answer: once you've been stopped for a while, a little man scurries out from the bushes and runs off with the stop sign, indictating that you can go.
But of course, I'd never seen the "little stop sign man", and so I assumed my mom was continuing through the stop signs illegally. So, every time she did it, I would lecture her about how we should have waited for the "little stop sign man" to come from the bushes. She was baffled, of course, and probably considered for a while that my mental health might have been somewhat less than ideal. Later, when I confronted my sister about her lie, she denied having ever said it...... thanks, sis.

Still confused about road signs

when i was young and continuing to see the pedestrian crossing sign on the way home from church/school/whatever, I wondered why they got their own cross-walk sign, because our church members didn't have their own cross-walk signs, especially in front of everyone elses homes and schools. (Thinking that Pedestrian was Presbyterian (sp?))

Super Secret Sally

When I used to see the signs that said "WRONG WAY" posted on ramps to and from the highway I always used to think to myself "how do they know it's the wrong way, it may be the right way(direction) for someone to go home"

yaddayaddayadda

The State Bump

When we were kids, we went on lots of car trips. Whenever we crossed a state line, Dad would say "here comes the state bump!" This was the little bump in the highway caused by the fact that each state's highway contruction crews' work never quite joined up perfectly. And he was right--within a couple of yards of the "Welcome to..." sign there was always a little bump.

Of course, there's a little bump every couple of yards on practically every highway in the world. But it sounded so plausible!

The hilarious part is that my sister believed this until she was in her TWENTIES!

Mike B

We didn't have a car when I was little, so most of what I knew about traffic signs came from what I saw in my suburb. When I was lucky enough to go somewhere in the country with a relative, etc., I couldn't understand why they kept breaking the law by passing all the "DO NOT PASS" signs...

Crow T. Robot

My dad told me when I was about 7 or so that the sign indicating a median is ahead (looks like a shoe imprint with an arrow going around the right of it) meant that there were pedestrians trying to cross the street ahead, and you had to drive real fast to avoid them.

James

Until I was about 9 or 10, I used to believe that the "no outlet" signs (designating a dead end street) meant that the houses there had no electricity (no outlets)!

clover

My youngest daughter was a precocious reader. She learned to read various road signs long before she went off to kindergarten.

Every day I would drive the other children to school across the Lake Washington Floating Bridge, my youngest would read aloud all the road signs. There used to be a sign in the middle of the bridge that said "draw bridge.'' For a long long time she was convinced that this was an exhortation, and that she was supposed to bring along a pencil and tablet so she could stop and draw the bridge.

Martha's mom

I convinced my sister that stop signs with white lines around them were optional....you could stop-if you want. She believed until she happened to notice that ALL stop signs had white lines around them

Minna