Driving Vehicle and Standards Agency (DVSA) officers.Who are the ‘authorised persons’ who can signal you to stop?Īlthough there are a number of road users who might give arm signals-car drivers and cyclists among them-there are certain authorised people whose signals you must obey by law. Who are the authorised persons who can signal you to stop?.By the time we're done, you'll be ready for any and every (non-rude) hand signal that comes your way. We'll take you through who has the authority to stop your vehicle, what those arm signals will look like, and how you can respond in kind. But because you probably won’t see the police and others using hand gestures all that often, you might not recognise them when you do. Certain authorised people can also direct you by giving you hand signals. Signs and signals play a key role in helping to keep drivers safe on the roads-but it isn’t just permanent signs you need to look out for. This appears to hold true on the road: Studies have found, for example, that drivers are less likely to honk at cars of similar perceived status as their own.Police and Authorised Person Hand Signals Explained Studies have shown this effect in myriad ways people are more likely to be drawn toward those whose surnames begin with a shared letter (e.g., “B” people gave more money to Bush in 2000, “G”s gave more to Gore) and more likely to look favorably on those who share their birthday. The first is the general human bias in favor of self-similarity. There seem to be two things at work here. But the wave is hardly limited to people in Jeeps: One hears it talked about among drivers of Corvettes, Saabs, Volkswagen GTIs, Subarus, Harley-Davidsons, and others. Or perhaps it’s because Jeep drivers were more likely to have their windows open and tops down. One of the most oft-cited examples of this is for Jeep drivers, and one strain of speculation says it emerged from soldiers waving to another in passing vehicles. There is one other class of gestures worth noting, what I shall call the vehicle affinity experience namely, people driving the same vehicle exchanging a wave. How does one say that he’s sorry? A correspondent to a British newspaper suggested a finger pointed to the head as a gun - I should be shot for such an epic gaffe! -but as one letters-column respondent (self-identified as the chairman of the “Polite Society”) aptly noted, the problem with this “is that it can be misconstrued as meaning ‘you should be shot’.” (There are regional variants on the latter: On narrow Seattle streets, where one person pulls to the side to allow another to pass, the wave is considered a proper reply in Hawaii, they give the “ shaka.”) But there are still other situations for which people have never quite settled on the appropriate signal. Nor does its opposite, the “thanks” wave. This language is long forgotten by most drivers, but a variety of unofficial signals still flourish-the most prominent, “the finger,” needs no explanation. (The paranoid conclusion of this may be the “gang initiation killing” rumors of a few years back, in which motorists were warned that flashing their lights at another car would trigger a homicide.)īefore the advent of electric signals, hand signals were an integral part of the official driving experience-an arm extended and bent downward down meant the driver was slowing down, for example. ‘To signal radar, first flash your headlights then make a circular motion with your hand.’ ” Informal road signals, then, are seen as a kind of secret code, like gang signs or Masonic hand symbols, which only certain groups understand. This section of the turnpike was notorious for speed traps. Take, for instance, this account of a Greyhound bus driver in the New York Times in 1975: “Traveling west, the sun was level with the windshield, yet Al spotted a radar signal from an oncoming truck. Another idea is that headlight flashes (as well as some other signals) are introduced by people-like truckers-for whom the road is a job site, and so they are born as a kind of workplace lingo. One source speculates that the gesture came into widespread practice only with the advent of a steering-column-mounted headlight control in the late 1960s, which made it simpler to “flash” than the old floor-positioned switch. The headlight flash for the speed trap seems, like most informal signals, to be of rather obscure origin. How do these things emerge, how are they transmitted, and how are they understood? What really intrigued me about the episode, however, was the existence of this informal language of road signals-either creative adaptations of the simple communicative tools available on an automobile (lights, turn/brake signals, horn) or, often, some gesture by the driver himself (a wave, “the finger,” etc.).
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