In Britain, stop signs are intentionally kept very rare, so that when you see one you stop. It's not always obvious what the danger is until it would have been to late to stop otherwise.
That's very interesting. I've been to a few places in the U.S. where many, many intersections had no signage. To me it seemed absolutely crazy, but maybe the thinking was the same as the British practice: "this way people will have to pay attention".
Well, no signage is really easy because we have the base rule of yielding to traffic coming from right. It works fine in a mesh of small residential streets where you can expect all of the intersections to work the same way.
The problem I have with this is that I have no idea whether any given intersection in town is going to have signs or not. I can make educated guesses that work well most of the time, but I'd prefer to make fewer guesses in traffic. If you don't have a yield sign, you have to look out for the gray backside of a yield sign for the road on the right. It may or may not be there. Depending on angle, position, background, weather, dirt, snow, ..., it can be hard to spot.
I don't know how much people pay attention. I get the impression that locals simply memorize each intersection. This can lead to some interesting scenes when the signs and rules are changed.
When you're in a new place, well, you're stuck scanning for the backsides of yield signs again. I find it rather stressful; it'd be nicer to be able to fully focus on the traffic and lanes & route ahead.
Here's one example. The street on the right looks smaller than the road ahead, so you can make the educated guess that they have to yield. And indeed they do -- you find the triangle sign on the lamp post just beyond the crosswalk.
Another small street on the right. You can, again, guess that they have the yield sign, but you cannot see it until you're very close to the intersection as the brick building is blocking the view. It's a 40kph road where locals often go a little faster. At that speed, you may kinda have to slam the brakes to yield to sudden incoming traffic. If you're not local, do you drive the speed limit and trust your instinct, or do you brake after every block to figure out who's going to yield?
Same town, different street. The stubby little street on the right might look like a small parking lot, but it's not. And they have no yield sign. Even the locals regularly fail to yield around here. Luckily the speed limit here is only 20kph so it's not particularly dangerous. Shame that's not true of all the intersections that lack the signs where you'd expect them to be.
I guess the reason we don't rely on road marks so much is that they're covered by snow & ice half the year. That plus frost heaving & constant snow plowing & studded tyres are very effective at erasing the road markings.
