Briefing #10.6 | Visual Sabotage
Year: 2026
Type: report
Abstract: Briefing #10.6 in the "Don't Look Up" road-safety series addressed to the European Commission (DG MOVE), the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) and the European Parliament's Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN). This briefing exposes a geometric and psychological flaw embedded in European signage standards and the 1968 Vienna Convention: directional delineator (chevron / diagonal-stripe) signs that contradict both the road markings and the way the human brain reads the road in motion. The "water-drop logic" used to design these panels assumes the driver reads them top-to-bottom, as on a drawing — yet a moving driver processes the scene bottom-up, in 3D perspective. Tilted into that perspective, the delineator's lines point "backwards", clashing with the hatched markings that open forward like a "V" (V ≠ ꓥ). The analysis also dissects a hybrid "sequential gaze trap", in which the upper half of a panel signals "pass right" and the lower half "pass left" within the same second of perception, and traces the root cause to the Vienna Convention's failure to distinguish a road split from a junction (see Briefing #3). The conclusion: the EU needs a unified geometry in which signs and road markings speak one language — that of movement, physics and human biology — so that a safe sign requires no interpretation. Author: Daniel Fadur, Road Safety Expert — Smart Safety Solutions (https://fadur.net). Full archive: https://fadur.net/dont-look-up/
Author: Fadur, Daniel
Language: English
Topic: Safety Warnings and Signage
Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7220380922