Posted by agree, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Nov 8, 2012 at 3:13 pm

I agree that these signs are great, but hiding them in the trees is dumb. They do seem to encourage car drivers to drive more safely in pedestrian zones.

Posted by Anon., a resident of the Crescent Park neighborhood, on Nov 8, 2012 at 3:21 pm

Whether hidden by trees or not, I really hate these things.

What ever happened to common sense?

But, if we are going to have such things, why not have them be something like

1) normally white to denote the speed limit.

2) yellow when someone exceeds that limit by less than 5 MPH.

3) flashing red when someone exceeds the limit by more than 5 MPH.

As they are now they are just an irritating distraction. And I bet they cost a lot too.

Meanwhile go out to the Baylands and look at the mess. The Interpretive Center is closed. I walked out to the sort of nice new looking rebuild building SeaBees or something, and there is no public entrance, no restrooms. Who gets to go out there and work and why doesn't the public benefit from it.

If the police would just pull a few people over and warn them about their bad driving it would solve the problem.

Posted by Ducatigirl, a resident of the Old Palo Alto neighborhood, on Nov 8, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Ducatigirl is a member (registered user) of Palo Alto Online

I find these things distracting to a fault! The flashing makes you take your eyes off the road, which is unsafe at any speed. Maybe it is better that this one is hidden in the trees.

Posted by MIchael Bechler, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Nov 19, 2012 at 7:46 pm

They've cut down the branch that was blocking the sign. You can see it now.

Perhaps this will slow people down.

Normally, signs are tradeoff between distraction and information. But these are hard to understand. They seem to have trouble reading speeds accurately, and often flash conflicting information. They might be easier to understand if they were green when you're within the limit, yellow when you're 5mph over, and red if you're more than 5mph over... all the while no flashing.