This road sign indicates:

Explanation

The recommended direction of travel for lorries.

This sign belongs to the family of information signs: a blue rectangular field, a white arrow pointing up and the silhouette of a lorry beside it. Its message is a routing recommendation; that is, travelling in this direction is considered suitable for goods vehicles. It neither compels the lorry to go that way nor drives passenger cars off that route.

The safety logic behind this sign is clear: the shortest route is not always the right route for a lorry. A narrow street, a bridge with a limited weight capacity, a steep gradient and a residential district are places where the passage of a heavy vehicle means a longer braking distance, a wider turning radius and greater danger to pedestrians. By posting this sign, the traffic authority guides the freight flow onto a suitable road before it reaches that bottleneck, without having prohibited anything.

The exam trap in this question is colour and shape. Every prohibition comes in a red circle and every mandatory instruction in a blue circle; a blue rectangle means "information and guidance". That one rule separates the three options: an arrow inside a blue rectangle never creates an obligation or an exclusivity and merely informs. If you take the shape of the sign rather than the wording of the options as your criterion, you will always get this class of question right.

• "One-way" is announced by a separate sign without a lorry symbol; besides, this sign prohibits the passage of no other vehicle and creates no exclusivity. • Allocating a lane to a particular type of vehicle is announced by a special lane sign posted above that lane; this sign speaks about the direction of the whole road, not one lane of the carriageway.

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