Als Schweizer war ich leicht iritiert auf meiner ersten Fahrt durch Deutschland (Weil am Rhein bis Hamburg). Da steht doch ernsthaft ein Schild auf der Autobahn: 130, ausser mit Anhänger, dann 100, sollte es nass sein, müssen alle 80 fahren, ausser jedoch es ist zwischen 06:00 und 22:00 Uhr, dann muss man 100 fahren. Und das ganze muss man entziffern während man mit 180 aus der unbegrenzten Zone kommt...
@@thenamen935 Solcher Schilder werden aber in aller Regel min. ein mal wiederholt, und im Zweifel die niedrigst angezeigte Geschwindigkeit auf der rechtesmöglichen Spur fahren, dann ist man ganz sicher
bei jedem video was sich über deutschland dreht aber von einem ausländer gemacht wird sind 70 % der zuschauer deutsch gibs das phänomen nur hier oder auch in anderen ländern ?
There is a mistake: If you enter a village with a yellow sign, it means 50 kmh speedlimit for all vehicles WITH ENGINE, so strictly speaking with a bicycle you are allowed to drive faster :D
@@Apokalypse456 eine Rakete ist gleichgesetzt wie motor ;-) nur wen du aus eigener Kraft schneller fährst ist es erlaubt also fahrrad / longboard den Bergrunter ;-)
And a second one: The switch of light to low beam is not neccessary. You can keep head lights when the streets are dark because there is no city lights.
soweit ich weiß das du nur mit dem Fahrrad schneller fahren sofern du keine Möglichkeit der Kontrolle deiner Geschwindigkeit hast. Sprich wenn du ein GPS-Gerät mit Geschwindigkeitsanzeige montiert hast und mit 80 km/h durch die Stadt fährst hast du ein Problem.
The fifth time the sign of Coswig was stolen, the mayor set up a new sign on where the old sign was located. The new sign said info about the cost of a new sign.
Is this video going to change your life? No, of course not. Is it something you need to know? Unlikely. Is it interesting? Propably not. Oh man, you know how to promote your videos!
👍 ja genau! Ich frag mich jedesmal bei geoguessr wie die Leute in den USA oder Canada wissen in welchem Kaff sie gerade sind. So ein amtliches Ortsschild ist schon ne feine Sache. 😁
@@666LonesomeSailor Warum nicht. Waas? meme? Du bist einer von Ihnen... Ist so einfach mit dem unsichtbaren Sündenbock. Fast wie mit den britischen Politikern und Brüssel. Irgendwas läuft schief: Brüssel wars!! Irgendwas läuft gut: haben wir das nicht gut gemacht?
4:30 I'm German and I didn't know that difference. I'm pretty sure, that over 90 percent of Germans also don't know that. I always thought, one is an old and the other a new version of signs
Since I'm from Germany and know about these signs, one could consider this video pretty boring for me, but I learned some new details... and since I travel abroad now and then, it motivates me to learn more about the road signs in the countries I'm visiting. Thanks a lot! I definitely had fun watching this.
In North Rhine-Westphalia it is possible to put a surname to the cities name like "Stadt der Fernuniversität Hagen", a lot of "Hansestadt something", "Klingenstadt Solingen". I think it is possible in other states too.
Most important it was "BundeshauptstadtOhneNennnenswertesNachtleben", now it is "BundesstadtOhneNennnenswertesNachtleben", no big difference! Not to forget they sold bad wine there! After a visit to the Aennchen we had a headache the next day and could hardly follow the tour in the Bundestag.
I know a few places that belong to one but don't have it mentioned on their signs... Never saw it really, tbh. And when I did, I probably just never gave it a second thought.
Even better, the word Samtgemeinde isn't used anywhere else either. I know it as "Großgemeinde", or just "Gemeinde", even though it consists of different villages, all several kilometers apart but under the same municipality.
Read this one for the first time today and I am unable to wrap my head around it. "Samt" is a fabric or it has been until today. Seriously I'm not that ignorant not to know that "samt" is a well known and often used word meaning roughly "zusammen" oder "mit".
1:10 You have to switch to low beam at night only if there is a continous road lighting - otherwise you can use the high beam ( if there is no opposite traffic, or a car/bike in front of you)
Das sind so Sachen, da kann man sich wirklich nicht vorstellen, dass das für andere Menschen kompliziert sein kann, wenn man es selbst tagtäglich sieht. Und ich hätte nie erwartet, einige der Ortsschilder von so unbedeutenden Orten in einem Video zu sehen, was eine solche Reichweite hat :) Never thought, things as normal to someone used to it can be so confusing to others. And some of the so remarkably unimportant mentioned places I would never have dreamed of seeing them in a video with sich a huge audience.
You changed my life with this video. And that was even before the section with the advanced stuff. Surely, you Brits must acknowledge now that at least when it comes to involuntary humor, we Germans aren't doing all too bad, really? We're not on a par with Brits in the field of "ridiculous", but we're not trailing far behind either :D
Sometimes the "Kreis" is even in the name of the Kreis itself, for example Hohenlohekreis. Also: there is an option that the panel on the End-of-Urban-Area-Sign is blue which indicates an Autobahn in the given direction... These signs are not only science but at this point pure art... :D
I live in Landkreis Harburg. The funny thing about this is that the former city of Harburg is part of Hamburg. Which is another federal state than the Landkreis is in. Try explaining THAT to anybody.
Holy ... just randomly clicked on the video and at 0:06 the Sign appears, i realiced thats my village i'm currently live in Greetings from Mahlow,(Brandenburg), Germany :)
@@Graf_Leo_von_Caprivi Eigentlich schönes Dörfchen, nur leider mittlerweile zu dicht besiedelt. Sind '99 von Berlin nach Mahlow gezogen und damals konnte man auf der "Hauptstraße" gemütlich Mittagsschlaf machen, jetzt könnte man aufgrund der Lautstärke noch nichtmal mehr ein Auge zumachen
In our district all village signs say (for example the borough of the city, which I'm working in) Dausfeld Stadt Prüm Eifelkreis Bitburg-Prüm (Eifelkreis Bitburg-Prüm is simply the district.) All village signs have that one.
I found it very interesting... If you have ever been a Soldier in the middle of nowhere with a translation book trying to figure all that out, you would know...I was there BC before computers... This should be on the list of required vids for new Soldiers assigned there...
@1:10 No, you don't have to switch off the high beams. If the lighting is insufficient, you can drive with high beam in a city, provided that you don't have traffic (cars, bicycles, ...) coming your way
Simple Answer: the name of the Village is big. Smaller are information by which (maybe its called like that) district its organised. There are different types of those "states" . Some are smaller and those smaller "states" get organised by federal states.
Another thing I got used to seeing on these signs whilst living in Basel was "Zollgrenzbezirk" (customs border area). I was led to believe that this had something to do with special customs arrangements, if you lived in one of these places and were importing goods, but I never found out for sure.
@@imrehundertwasser7094 in my experience. Village "x" in the township"y" in the borough of "z" in the county of " g" . With a telephone number from area " k".
@@mweskamppp I can only speak for New York, here you will just find a sign by the road the village or town has put up saying "welcome to xyz" As far as speed changes, that is dictated by the posted limit wherever changes occur.
There isn't room in my head for the information in this video, but I love that you made it anyway. This channel is absolute gold and gives this stranded Brexitlander severe pangs of Deutschlandweh. Thank you!
I must add a little correction: It is allowed to drive with high beam lights (Fernlicht) within a urban area (yellow sign). However you must switch to low beam, if there is a continous street light or if there is a car in front or driving opposite to you. I asked the same question, when I was schooled for my Truck license in the Bundeswehr. My driving instructor said, continous means, if there is shadow between the different light poles, then it is not continous. And that occured only in very rare areas in cities. Source: StVO §17 Abs.2 and 2 Hauptfeldwebel as driving instructors at the BW driving school.
Things like "Stadt" (city) and "Markt" (market) are mostly of historic importance. Dating back to the middle ages a city had some additional rights and privileges compared to a village - most important freedom from serfdom. 'Bürger' inhabitants of cities were subject to the cities administration and either directly to the nobleman of this region or the Emperor. Or the church. Sometimes even more than one faction. To gain 'town charter' (as google told me 'Stadtrecht' is translated) a town needed a certain amount of inhabitants, a standing militia and city walls among other stuff. So getting a town charter was quite a goal for larger settlements back in the day. A "Markt / Marktfleck" (market / market-settlement) was a village (usualle the largest in a given area) which was granted the right to hold market days (in contrast to having just a wandering merchant dropping by every so often). This was quite the income for a village and could well be a step stone on the way to become a city one day. As said - nowadays it's pretty much irrelevant (cities have a bit different administrative stuff going on compared to villages) but hey - tradition :D "Bad" by the way as addition to the name like 'Bad Abbach' or 'Bad Füssing' has some meaning to it. Namely that the place has a natural bath / spa area. And this is often associated with cures and long time treatment / health-tourism. To get this status a settlement must have at least some natural springs and the meanings to house cure tourists.
Fun Fact: If you come over the main Streat in my village (the street with the bus stop and most traffic, not that we have shops), they are those yellow signs on both sides. But if you look closely, they both have the name of the village on them, but diferent cities. (Yes, it´s the same village in two towns)
Even for a German, this was kind of interesting. It's something of a "natural order" for us, so we know all these things, but never think about them, so it is like a compressed zip file on the harddrive, but you now decompressed it and showed its content. Thanks for that. Also, the normal "end of urban driving rules" sign is not split in half to show the next place with a distance, that's a "special form" of this sign, while the normal form is just the name of the place with a red line diagonally over it.
I actually had no idea about any of this. I've been wondering what exactly a Landkreis is, though that made at least some sense to me. Gemeinde, though? Never even heard of it as such a formal thing.
Eine Gemeinde ist vom Verwaltugsstatus (?) her sowas ähnliches wie eine Stadt, nur dass es eben nicht eine große Ansiedelung von Menschen ist, sondern viele kleine, die mehrere km auseinander liegen können.
Actually you don't have to switch your head lights to low beam in urban areas. But you have to do that as soon as there's any street lights, which is very uncommon outside of these urban settlement areas. If the street lights are switched off (which is very common at night in small cities), you can still use your high beams inside of the urban area, as long as you are not obstructing the sight of another person using a vehicle. So as soon as you see a bicycle or another car coming towards you, low beams are mandatory at night. But that's the same inside or outside the urban settlement.
And then there's the places where a road is split between two places and the sign has both mentioned. Sometimes one after the other, sometimes with a vertical line in the middle so you know which side of the road belongs to which place. Example: Cordingen Kolonie and Hünzingen Kolonie, where Cordingen Kol. belongs to the municipality of Bomlitz, while Hünzingen Kol. belongs to the town/city of Walsrode in the district Heidekreis.
You showed two signs that I see all the time. The very first one is where we are building a house and the Berlin Steglitz-Zehlendorf is where I currently live. What a coincidence 😂
In Switzerland there are a lot of villages that have formed larger municipalities for financial reasons but the postal addresses don't change, so you still have the old name of the village on the envelopes (and the same postcode).
2:02 Yay Meppen! I was born not far from there in a little village called Lathen which etymologically speaking lent it's name to London as did the river Ems to the river Thames!
I love everything that has to with Geography. As a child I loved to study the road atlas when driving in the car with my family. All the different colours of different roads (Autobahn, Landstraße, Deutsche Märchenstraße), the different-sized towns and villages, the shape of the landscape (Mountain, Forest, Settlement) were beautiful and smelled like adventure, culture and experience.
What a wonderful piece of unnecessary knowledge :-) Let me try to add something: some city names start with the word "Bad" which translates to "Bath". It indicates that there's some kind of officially approved therapeutic bath or a nice spa being offered at this place. In some places in Schleswig-Holstein e.g. this also marks them as relevant for tourism and allows shops to be open on Sundays and other public holidays under the so called "Bäderregelung". The rationale behind it being, when tourists arrive at this kind of place on a Sunday they need to be able to buy food and supplies.
You don't need to change to low light beam only because you pass a yellow sign. If there is insufficient or intermittened street lighting, you are allowed to turn on your brights even though you are inside a city.
"At night you must switch your headlights to low beam" well in driving school i learned i only have to switch to low beam at night *if there is sufficient lighting on the street by for example street lamps*
Two things to add: "Ortsteil" is not necessary on the signs. As an example our signs read (Village Name) Landkreis Nordwestmecklenburg That's all, we don't do the stuff with the Ortsteil on the sign but it's written on our ID Card. ("(Name of the Gemeinde), OT (Village name)) OT meaning Ortsteil And in fact you don't need to write the name of the Gemeinde on a letter, you can simply put the name of your village, it will automatically be sorted correctly. The second thing is: There my be signs saying your leaving and driving to nowhere or they say you are driving to the current city. Examples: ↑Stralsund 1km Stralsund (red stroke line) Or ↑ Neues Dorf (red stroke line) The second one is because the road is leading to a Bundesstraße and there would be two villages nearby so they left it blank
struggling to imagine the intersection between "people who need to know that this town is the administrative centre of the district" and "people who don't know this until they literally reach the boundary"
I find these type of videos very interesting. I guess as Germans we never really think of all these differences on signs. so I am havin lots of "a-ha" moments here
And at times it gets even more confusing. I for example live in Lobberich. Thats all on most of these signs. But Lobberich is a once village that is now part of the Stadt Nettetal. So its all the same Stadt, but all those small city units are separate but still technically the same city. And Nettetal is part of Kreis Viersen. And to really mess with people the Kreis Kaldenkirchen excsists, but only for registration plates on cars. Kaldenkirchen, despite appearing as a Kreis on registration plates is actually a city thats part of Kreis Viersen.
OK, I haven't read all 517 comments on this, but I'm guessing that I probably am truly the odd man out regarding this (and also really late to the party)' I actually have been wondering about what all goes on these "delightful" signs for literally decades. As an architect, wannabe urban planner and aficionado of street architecture and roadside signage (don't get me into the fascinating world of international signage), I appreciate the explanation - even if there's still more to it. My parents and I lived in Germany a couple times when I was a child and as we drove around I suppose it always appealed to my sense of order that Germany always let you know exactly where you were and what city, town, community or district you're entering and when you're leaving. In the US, the equivalent signs (white lettering on green generally) always seemed to me to be random and haphazard. I was tickled when my wife, who is from Michigan, first took me to the town of Frankenmuth, which has spent the better part of 50-60 years promoting its German heritage. On either side of town on the main highway through it, someone thought to import and install those wonderful yellow signs telling you that you are entering Frankenmuth and when you leave they are just as you showed, with a red slash through the Frankenmuth name below and an arrow with the next town and the distance to it above. Won't change my life, but I for one, definitely watched the whole post with great interest!
Mahlow Gemeinde Blankenfelde-Mahlow Landkreis Teltow-Fläming .."that seems like rather a lot of words for a simple village" Wales has entered the chat 😂
Bonus fact: there are two different sizes of these signs. Mostly you see the smaller ones because they are cheaper, but sometimes there is a small town using the big ones. As far as I know there is no rule which one to use.
In Switzerland, we also have municipalities made up of several villages. These are usually the result of municipalities merging. Unlike in Germany, the postal address doesn't change, so you still write the name of the village or whatever because they still have a separate postcode.
As a local, I'd like to mention that while yes, you are all very welcome in Leverkusen, but please pronounce the name properly - it's Léverkusen, with the stress on the first syllable. A lot of sports commentators get it wrong, too - for some reason it seems rather difficult ...
A lot of those like Mark or Markt are leftovers from medievil times. Stadt/city is also only written on these signs if this status was already aquired through meeting certain conditions back then. Sometimes you find "cities" with 300 people or less, but they met conditions 500 years ago, so they got the title
me, a german (before watching): ah yes, this seems interesting me, a german (after watching): okay wow, i'm more confused than before (but still, thanks for explaining and it was actually good, i just never realised they were so fucked up..)
Btw. the letter will reach his destination if you still choose the wrong name (the Ortsteil name instead of that from the Gemeinde) untill you did write the correct Postleitzahl on it. I like to call myself a Lower-Rhine Aboriginie, because I was born to a family that have lived in the same small village since centuries. So I'm proud of my heritage and as my father still lives in that village and I send him letters from time to time, I could assure you that the Post is able to deliver the letters, even if I allways write only the name and the correct Postleitzahl of the small village on the envelope.
I'm pretty certain some people played too much Civilization, or Total War, or Anno, and just wanted to keep track of every single tile in the game, but completely lost control, and this turned out.
1. I thought germany will make it simplier (too many variations of the same land division/responsibilities) 2. I love your videos, I never get bored but when you asked 3:07 "Still watching" I really needed to focus :D .. too complicated but I wanna learn anyway :)
One thing you didn‘t explain exactly right: if there‘s one of the official „titles“, like „Stadt“ or „Markt“, it does have some significance - historically. In former times, there were settlements, villages and so on. If a settlement grew in importance, the sovereign could grant „Marktrecht“ (the right to Organize a market). This was significant for the wealth and the type of People settling there. And for taxes and so on. The title „Stadt“ was a further step, granting even more rights of administration and fortification. So, even if the titles don‘t mean much today, they do bear some historical significance, and especially smaller villages are still quite proud that they got Marktrecht some centuries ago.
In Norway we have some of the same default rules for urban Vs open road driving. But here you just sort of have to guess where a city or village begins and ends. Sometimes we have a singn saying you enter, but never a sign for when you leave. And to make it worse, Norwegian villages just have much more gradual fuzzy edges than the fairly compact German villages. Fortunately, while 50km/h is the default speed in cities (80 km/h on the open roads) I've never seen a road inside a city without an explicit speed limit sign. But I do occasionally drive for several minutes on country roads wondering if the previous 60 zone still applies or if I've missed a end of 60 zone sign, and are now annoying everyone behind me by driving 60 in an implicit 80 zone...
On one occasion, I had to drive a hire car very early in the morning, way before sunrise, and found it almost impossible to read the yellow with black signs in my headlights. I got lost twice, due to this. I found it very strange that they were not reflective, considering how well-designed and well-maintained the roads are in Germany, compared to here in the US, where they are mostly horrible. And also, Germans seem to treat driving as a "high art", whereas here, people often have no idea how to drive safely, or maintain their cars properly.
2:22 "Landeshauptstadt" is an official title, wich means something like that it is the "main city" of a land in Germany. For Example: Hannover is the "Landeshauptstadt" of Niedersachsen. Diese Kommentarsektion ist nun Eigentum der BRD.
One special ne you havent mentioned: Wasserstadt. I grew up in one and itbonly meant that the fact that the town is bild basically on an island betwenn lakes and has a river running through all aof the city was historically very important to the town, an that fact is true till today and they want everyone to know. also it does well for tourist catching.
Not the only oddity when it comes to speed limits in built-up areas: Rules say that when a limit other than 50 km/h is posted inside built-up areas, higher OR lower, the limit applies to ALL vehicles. Another rule says that heavy trucks (>7,5 tons) are restricted to 80 km/h or the posted speed limit (whichever is lower) on Autobahns and 60 km/h or the posted limit (whichever is lower) on other roads outside of built-up areas. So when 70 km/h is posted on a normal highway, trucks can only go 60. But when 70 is posted on a main road in a built-up area, the same truck can go 70. It gets even weirder on Autobahns within built-up areas. The 50km/h limit doesn't apply there, but the general provision above does. As a result, trucks can generally go 80 on Autobahns, but when a higher limit is posted on an Autobahn stretch within a built-up area posted as such, the higher limit applies. (Although trucks are of course electronically limited to 90 km/h, so they can't really drive that fast). It was clearly not intended this way, but this is how the German traffic code is worded.
Yay my hometown (Wolfenbüttel) is in a video of rewboss. However, I have to add that I have never seen a sign that actually says "Kreisstadt Wolfenbüttel, Landkreis Wolfenbüttel" they only say "Wolfenbüttel". Technically the sign shown by you would be correct, though.
