Road signs, part 1

It only took me a year-and-a-half to notice this (I guess I'm a bit slow that way), but road signs on the motorway here never indicate direction, but rather point you in the direction of particular cities. So instead of a sign saying "EAST", it will instead say something like this:


Back home signs will often just say "I-66 West", whereas I guess they assume that you know Swiss geography when you drive here. (Oh, that's the other thing--there's hardly any reference to motorway numbers here. Technically all of the motorways have a number, but you usually don't know what it is until you're actually on it.) For example, yesterday I knew I wanted to head south from Zurich, but of course the signs only gave me options for Luzern or Chur, both of which are south but only one of which was correct (actually, there was also an option for Winterthur, but I knew that was north). Luckily I guessed correctly that Chur was the one. I'm still trying to decide if this says anything deep and meaningful about our respective cultures. In some ways the Swiss system seems tailor-made for the States, given many Americans' geographical ineptitude (e.g., several years ago one of my students thought Canada was south and Mexico was north...this despite living in Los Angeles, just a couple of hours north of Mexico). And to their credit, at least they usually pick obvious cities to orient yourself, unlike when we were in Italy and the signs would point you in the direction of some tiny village 50km away so you constantly had to memorize every city and town that was even vaguely in the direction you wanted to go.