Singing Roads Are The Most Terrible Idea In The World And Should Be Abolished
LONDON — It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Instead of putting “rumble strips” on a road in a small Dutch village to warn drivers who veered onto the shoulder, officials installed musical strips.
Workers painted the stretch of road near the village, Jelsum, last Friday to “play” music from the regional anthem when tires rumbled along the raised strips. But soon, the biggest rumbling was coming from the village as residents begged the authorities to make it stop.
“The Frisian national anthem is fine, but not 24 hours a day,” Sijtze Jansma, who lives about 600 feet from the road, told the news website RTL. “I’m going nuts. You can’t sit outside and you can’t sleep at night.”
Full story here.
I was one and the same with every person in the world who first chuckled at the idea of a musical road. “What a good idea,” I thought. Then I immediately realized that it’s a fucking terrible idea. If the goal here is to wake people up before driving off the side of the road, then just put in the normal roadside strip things that nobody has been able to sleep through ever. Building these things to play songs obviously just makes people drive on them all the time.
Not only that but these things only sound good at one speed, which means that every other speed plays a distorted version of the intended song. So yeah, it’s no surprise that every person who lives within earshot of a highway that plays a never-ending surrealist loop of the Dutch national anthem wants to kill themselves within 24 hours. An off tune version of this fucking song 24/7/forever?
I’d off myself within 3 hours. Of course that’s a terrible idea. That’s hell.
The Dutch are a happy, tough people; but even they don’t stand a chance against this. Humans can’t be trusted with things like this. Nobody’s ever going to drive down a gimmicky singing road and not ride those off-key singing rumble strips until their ears bleed. It’s in our nature. We’re weak, simple animals, and if you hand a monkey a bell, it’s going to ring it until you kill yourself.
