Anyone walking through the Hoogeveen Trasselt district will immediately see it: street name signs in different colors and with different fonts. Where one sign is blue, there is a red or green one a little further away. In other neighborhoods in Hoogeveen, such as Schutlanden and Schoonvelde, the picture is very different: there the street name signs all have the same color and the same letters.
The variation in street names in the Trasselt district did not just arise, explains the municipality of Hoogeveen. In general, street signs in the municipality are blue with white letters, but in a number of neighborhoods from the 1980s a conscious deviation from this was made.
According to a spokesperson for the municipality, these are so-called ‘cauliflower neighborhoods’. “A number of neighborhoods built in the 1980s have a maze of winding roads. In professional jargon, these neighborhoods are also called cauliflower neighborhoods, because the floor plan is reminiscent of a cauliflower.”
According to the municipality, this design made it more difficult to orientate yourself in the neighborhood. “It is sometimes difficult to find your way in such neighborhoods, especially when you consider that there was no navigation on mobile phones or in cars at the time,” says the spokesperson. It turned out to be difficult to find your way to a specific address.
To improve this, it was decided to provide additional ‘visual recognition’ in the street. Street signs were given their own color for each street. The house number signs were also made in the same color. This way you could see more quickly which street you were on. If the house number was green, you were in De Wezeboom and not in De Beugel, for example.
