Prague's 383,000-crown electronic road sign was broken for almost the entire summer

An experimental electronic road sign on Lidická Street in Prague, installed in June for testing purposes, was out of service for most of the summer. This was confirmed by city police spokeswoman Irena Seifertová, who said the device was switched off from July 17 until early September and only came back online the day before yesterday.

The sign covers a section of the street reserved for parking and displays variable text — a technology usually used in tunnels and on motorways. It permanently shows a "no stopping" symbol, with an additional message underneath that changes throughout the day to provide further details.

Drivers ignore the sign

Jan Panenka, chair of the Prague 5 traffic committee, said the city's hopes that drivers would respect the stopping ban had not been met: "Drivers are not complying with the sign," he said after the start of the new school year.

According to city police data, the picture was mixed during the periods when the sign was actually working. Patrols initially recorded between 10 and 20 violations a day, but this number gradually dropped to around five a day. Spokeswoman Seifertová noted that this could suggest drivers were gradually getting used to the sign and starting to obey it. However, because the device was out of order for so long, the real observation period turned out too short to draw firm conclusions from the three-month trial.

A one-of-a-kind solution and its price tag

The project is overseen by Prague City Hall, which had not responded to written questions sent on Thursday morning by the time of publication. According to earlier information, the sign uses an unusual setup, cycling through four different displays over the course of a day.

City Hall spokesman Vít Hofmann explained back in mid-June that nothing like this had ever been used in Prague before, so the sign had to be custom-made. Manufacturing the sign and running a six-month pilot at the location on Lidická Street near Palacký Bridge cost 383,200 crowns excluding VAT. The whole project is funded through the international Unchain scheme, of which Prague is a partner.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz