Is This Odd Road Sign’s Job to Confuse New Yorkers? It’s Working
If you have been driving for a few years, odds are that you have come to feel a certain level of competence when you are out on the road, right? One might even be able to call if confidence in your driving ability. Let's not confuse this with actually being able to drive, you with the blinker going for no reason on the highway.
You might have gotten to the place in your driving experience that you know all the road signs. Not to be boastful, but I think that I know the way around the roads a bit, the speed limits, how to use a blinker and how to properly merge into traffic all while holding my coffee cup in one hand and shifting gears with the other. That was until one day when I passed a street sign that I had never seen before. I actually thought it was fake. Then I had to look it up. Has this ever happened to you?
Where did I see the street sign that caused such drama and confusion on my car trip?
The sign that I saw was on the road driving into Great Barrington Massachusetts from New York State. Easy enough drive, but it was just inside the Massachusetts state line that I saw it. Thickly Settled. Huh? Excuse me? What does that mean?
READ MORE: Are handwritten license plates legal in NYS?
What does the road sign Thickly Settled mean?
From the Massachusetts DMV guidebook, PDF, the term Thickly Settled has to do with the populus of the area, along with very specific speed zone restrictions. To the point that you might want to just reduce your speed to 25 mph, unless you see a different speed limit with that sign. Apparently, or better yet, allegedly these signs are often seen without speed limits as a potential way to get ticket revenue from out-of-state visitors.