Martin Underwood wrote to uk.transport.london on Sat, 25 Jun 2005:

Going back to the earlier theme of "let's mock the Americans' way of doing
things", another thing that I found when I drove over there was that their
standard of signposting, once you got off the multi-lane highways, was
abysmal. Maybe I'm just used to a three-way sign at the junction of almost
every country lane in England. And the road name signs are very difficult to
read because they are in a very condensed font, in white letters on a pale
green background: signs are supposed to be legible! I can only comment on
Massachussetts roads: I don't know whether it's the same in all states. It
doesn't help that the road atlas that I had was organised by town (rather
than being a simple west-to-east, north-to-south arrangement) and the
various maps were at different scales and in different styles. And this was
a map book that boasted on its front cover "highly acclaimed" and "very easy
to use"!!!

They don't seem to be very good at doing road maps - we used that same
one, I think, when we visited Mass. some years ago now.

The thing I noticed on our visit to Kansas was that distances were
measured in fractions of a mile, rather than yards - where we would say
there was an exit in (say) 200 yards, they'd put "3/8 mile"
--
"Mrs Redboots"
http://www.amsmyth.demon.co.uk/
Website updated 23 May 2005