Road signs betray poor management

THE NAME SIGNS ON A ROAD were removed on Thursday four years after a 27-year-old graduate of China Central Academy of Fine Arts found the road had no name signs and put up ones bearing his name. Thepaper.cn commented on Friday:

The "misnamed" road did not come to light until recently when the 27-year-old college graduate presented it as his graduation project. The real irony is that over the past four years residents in the neighborhood and even navigation and location-based services such as Baidu Maps, even the lamppost managers, called the road after the name of the student.

Unsurprisingly the student will be held accountable for his "mischief", because it takes the authorization of relevant authorities to name a road and the supposedly unnamed road actually has a name. One of the neighborhood committee staff said it is registered as Baiziwan South No 1 Road, but road signs bearing this name had never been put up.

Calls for the road to be renamed as the student had named it are not in line with road naming regulations, hence they will not be endorsed. But the big question is why the city managers failed to notice the road had no signs before and even after the student put his nameplates up.

Not only have local residents got used to calling the road by the student's name, but digital maps also labeled it as such, even the lampposts on the road were registered under that name. Poor management is certainly to blame for this. That is sound evidence of the necessity of naming city roads in an accurate and timely manner.

People need proper road names and signs, which is why some navigation and location service providers used the name on the student's road signs not long after he put them up. Local governments should ensure the name signs for roads are in place.