‘All UK football road signs are wrong’
A mathematician has created a video for his You Tube channel highlighting the fact that British signage for football grounds and clubs is wrong, and is a “national embarrassment”.
Tuesday, 31 Oct 2017 16:08 GMT
Matt Parker posted a video on his You Tube channel, highlighting the incorrect geometry of the football on UK road signage
Standing in front of a sign giving directions to Bristol City Football Club, Matt Parker who films and edits videos surrounding maths, explains that the graphic of the football is completely wrong.
Parker says in the video on his channel ‘Stand up Maths’: “Behind me is the official UK street sign for a football stadium (Ashton Gate, Bristol City’s ground). That football is incorrect. That geometry will not work, I’ve started a petition to get the mathematics of the football corrected.
“The problem is that this football is made entirely out of hexagons. If you have a look at a proper football, it has pentagons. So, while the street sign is light hexagons and dark hexagons, a real football has light hexagons and dark pentagons. Not only do the UK street signs not match reality, they don’t even match geometry.”
Additionally, the public funding required to change every football sign nationally would place an unreasonable financial burden on local authorities”
The petition in question was posted in a link below the video, and received almost 20,000 signatures to have the football graphic changed. However, the government has responded to the petition arguing that replacing all football signs across the UK would cost far too much money.
In a responding statement to the petition, the Government and the Department for Transport argued: “The purpose of a traffic sign is not to raise public appreciation and awareness of geometry which is better dealt with in other ways. The higher level of attention needed to understand the geometry could distract a driver’s view away from the road for longer than necessary which could therefore increase the risk of an incident.”
The statement continues: “Additionally, the public funding required to change every football sign nationally would place an unreasonable financial burden on local authorities. The Department could not justify the spending needed as an exercise to increase public awareness and appreciation of geometry. For the reasons given, we will not be changing the football symbol used on a traffic sign.”
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