Whenever, we are in Germany I have to smile at this sign. For a foreigner it is not clear. at. all.
For me it means…
No men are allowed to walk, children must not play with balls, no cars or houses are allowed here.
And, this sign means that it o.k. to do all of those things?
I really don’t understand these signs. Am I the only one that is confused by them?
These signs indicate a zone where cars and pedestrians have equal rights. Cars are only allowed to drive with walking speed while pedestrians can use the whole street. And children are allowed to play on street. :-)
Thank you, Anna. I really didn’t get it before but now the signs do make sense. I was hoping someone from Germany or someone that knows Germany would be able to tell me what it meant. :)
So why does one sign have a line through it and one does not? Does that mean that the sign without the line through it means a zone as Anna is describing it and the one with the line through it means it is not such a zone? I still don’t understand.
We have those in Holland too. It means that you are either entering (without the line) or exiting (with the line) a ‘woonerf’; a residential area, and you should expect that there will be lots of pedestrians and children playing on the road. These zones should not be used for through ‘traffic’. It is usually accomapnied by huge speed bumps. When I was living in Holland, there was an additional rule that in these zones, you could not go faster than 25 km per hour, if I remember correctly, which is well below the speed limit of a usual city zone.
Thanks for clearing that up, Sietske.
Don’t you love the way the Germans string about 28 syllables together to form one word?! :-)
The German art of putting an entire sentence into one word!
Nein, Ludvig spricht nicht Deutsches
No, Louis ne parle pas l’allemand
So he cannot tell you what “Schrittgeschwingdigkeit” means, but if a child of Louis’s said it, Louis would put a bar of soap in that child’s mouth! :-)
“Schrittgeschwindigkeit”
Mein Gott im Himmel Das ist ein grosses Wort!
Zoot! Alors! Mon Dieu! C’est un grand mot!
Louis la Vache, They almost have the entire alphabet in there!
:-) It’s walking speed - you are not allowed to drive faster than 7 km/h.
I like this long German words - you just say one word and everybody understands. :-)
“Louis la Vache, They almost have the entire alphabet in there!”
Bien sûr! Not to mention that you could hide a city block in a word that long! :-)
Louis is surprised they didn’t throw a couple of umlauts in for good measure! Not counting German-specific letters, using only the normal 26 of the English alphabet, they’ve used 12 of them in one word! :-)
:)