Information Signs, and the Category That Doesn't Quite Fit

Kenya's official system calls this category Information Signs, and the confirmed content is narrower than the name suggests. The handbook's examples are all variations on a single theme:

• No through road ahead
• No through road on the right
• No through road on the left

These describe the road's actual layout — specifically, that a road you might reasonably expect to continue does not. Nothing is being prohibited. You are simply having an assumption corrected before it costs you a wrong turn into a dead end.

That is the honest definition of the category: information signs change what you believe about the road, not what you are permitted to do on it.

Now the wrinkle worth knowing, because it will otherwise trip you up. The handbook files several signs that feel unmistakably informational — Parking, Bus Stop, Car Park, Parking Area for Taxis, Disabled Persons Vehicle Parking, Limited Duration Parking — under the Regulatory section rather than Information.

This is not an error to correct. It is how the source document is organised, and there is a defensible logic to it: a parking sign does more than describe, it designates — this bay is for taxis, that one has a sixty-minute limit, and those designations bind.

The practical resolution is the shape system from the previous lesson. Shape is the more reliable signal of function than the administrative category a sign happens to sit under. Those parking signs are rectangular, and rectangular means informing, whatever section of the handbook prints them. When category and shape disagree, trust the shape — and do not be thrown in an exam by a sign that "feels" informational being classed as regulatory.