On the shoulder of a monotonous stretch of Australian highway, two steel posts hold up a white and yellow sign with a question: “What is a monotreme?”
To passing cars, the game – roadside trivia – has begun. “If you’ve got kids in the car you can have a bit of fun between the question and answer,” says Bruce Woolley. “It wakes everyone up.”
A few kilometres down the road is a sign with the answer: it’s a mammal that lays eggs. A few hundred metres after that is another. “Keep playing trivia” it reads. “It may save your life!”
That’s the theory behind dozens of trivia signs found along five major highways in Queensland. It’s hoped they will improve driver alertness on long journeys across the state, which is more than seven times the size of the UK.
Queensland truck driver, David Thompson, has seen them all. “It’s the roadside version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,” he says.
“There’s no prize money but it might keep you awake, and alive. That’s worth more than a million dollars.”
The signs can also teach Queenslanders a few things in the process, Thompson says. “A lot of that stuff is missed in school nowadays. Any education is better than no education.”
Daryl Dickenson, a Brisbane truck driver, knows all the answers too. “Even if we have seen the answers a hundred times they are something to look at and a tool to fight fatigue,” he says. “But I wish they’d change them a bit more often.”
Every question and answer is stuck to an aluminium panel and secured with a padlock. This means they can be swapped out for fresh questions.
Heading north on the New England Highway, about an hour after crossing the New South Wales and Queensland border, Woolley hits an area dubbed the “fatigue zone”. The trivia begins: “When is rabbit breeding season?”
A few years ago that sign asked passing drivers about which animal is the fastest on earth, Woolley says. “It’s sort of a trick question because the peregrine falcon is only fastest when it dive bombs to catch prey,” he says. In flight, the peregrine can reach speeds of more than 320km an hour.
Prof Narelle Haworth from the Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety Queensland says roadside trivia is a low-cost fatigue countermeasure designed to break up the monotony of driving long distances. She says this aim is “in agreement” with road safety research but no study has specifically analysed the impact of roadside trivia.
“Doing the same boring thing without much stimulation leads to losing alertness,” she says. “The idea of roadside trivia is to make drivers more alert … maybe a passenger starts up a conversation who knows the answer.”
It requires an analogue approach. “I wouldn’t like to think drivers are using their mobile phones to look up the answer as they drive along,” Haworth says.
Queensland Transport and Main Roads (TMR) say trivia signs have been installed on the state’s highways since 2012 to “help drivers remain alert by keeping their mind active” with questions rotated at “varying intervals”.
Fatigue and distraction contributed to 10% of Queensland’s 265 road deaths in 2023, a TMR report says.
Dani Logan lives in Warwick, a town a few hours west of Brisbane. She says the trivia questions should be changed every few months, instead of waiting years for new material.
“For locals it gets boring pretty quick,” Logan says. “I think electronic signs could be a good idea, easier to change the questions.”
Haworth says losing focus when driving for long periods is an internationally recognised problem. “But in Australia, we seem to be pretty well up there in boring stretches of roads,” she says.
“Trivia signs seem to have got the public’s attention, literally.”
