I'm curious how legible street signs are when they're written in different writing systems. Arabic takes a similar amount of horizontal space as its English translation, but I find it harder to differentiate the words written in Arabic when I'm far away. On the other hand, Chinese signs tend to have fewer characters, but given the same amount of space, each character can be written larger.
In the Roman alphabet, even when I can't make out specific letters I can identify the frequency of ascenders and descenders. In languages that have similar sized characters (e.g. Korean or Hindi) I suspect that even if I were fluent, I wouldn't be able to read signs from as far away.
I wonder whether these characteristics of written language impact traffic patterns or road system design. Do some languages need more frequent road signs?