It seems pretty obvious; recognize a dangerous intersection or pedestrian area that is lacking a traffic sign and request one. Easy as pie, right? Wrong.

People have tried and many of them have failed while achieving a whole new level of frustration for their troubles. There is far more to it than people usually expect and when you’re talking about the safety of your child or your neighborhood, most people involved lose patience rather quickly. I’m sure that you’ve all seen the rallies; a cluster of residents holding up banners along the road to remind people to slow down, or watch for children, etc. This move is usually prompted by a near miss or actual accident and though there may be media coverage, that doesn’t translate in immediate action by the city or municipality responsible for road signage. Most people are under the assumption that a death equals the desired light or stop sign or decreased speed zone and though the number of instances at a particular location does play a part in the equation, there is much more to it than that. Clearly our towns and cities and villages can’t simply pop up random traffic signs and lights at every request. If you think about that for a second, you can see that the results would be a confusing heap of warnings every few feet.

The requirements for requesting a traffic sign or speed zone change may vary slightly depending on your municipality’s protocols; however, the basics remain similar throughout North America.

1-Your first step is to evaluate the actual need and be able to factually articulate why a sign is needed.

2-There are quite often online request forms available. If not, your city hall should be able to provide them.

3-Once you have made the official request, be prepared for a long wait.

There are several steps that need to be taken prior to a new sign addition, or old sign removal. Your municipality will study the area in question, including the number of “incidents” recorded for that location. They will also have the city’s engineering department look at the request and evaluate its necessity. Your individual municipality may have additional conditions, and whether a positive or negative result, this process can take months.

There is, unfortunately, no “quick fix” when looking to get a sign approved. However, if you remain patient and keep at it, you may just get exactly what you’re after.

Remember when you were a kid and you painstakingly put together your first model car? All of those tiny individual pieces that had to be snapped out of their plastic grid, making a mountain of parts on the newspaper covered dinning room table. My favorite part was always the page of shiny decals. You had to rub them on the finished model with the precision of a surgeon and they never gave you extra in case you messed up.

The speed machines that roar around the NASCAR track still bare those same decals today, albeit a substantially larger version. The car decals are of course an integral part of the racing team as they denote sponsorship. The larger the decal, the larger the sponsorship. Anyone involved in NASCAR or any other form of racing will tell you how important those decals are. No car decals mean no financial backers which in turn means no money to maintain a team, and believe me, racing isn’t cheap. The lucky ones are peppered so heavily in decal advertising that you can often have difficulty determining the original color of the car, but as decals equal dollars, teams are more than happy to have as many logos as will fit on the body of their road rockets.

What many people don’t realize is that not all of the decals on a race car are what they seem. Some of the most seemingly mundane parts of the car are in fact, not even real. Those shiny headlights? They’re decals. Tail and brake lights? Yup, you guessed it, they’re decals too.Think about it for a second. NASCAR races don’t take place in the dead of night, so who needs lights? The only real purpose that they would serve would be to shatter dangerously at the slightest impact, which as we all know, is pretty common in racing. If you are wondering why they would even bother with the decals, consider for a moment how odd and out of place a car with no headlights would look. That’s right racing fans, it’s all for show. You can squint as much as you like next time you’re watching a race and you probably still won’t be able to tell. Car decals have evolved to a product that appears to have such depth and texture that separating it from the real deal is next to impossible. So if you’re looking to upgrade your ride visually, you have countless decal choices available. Just don’t try to get away with the fake headlights.