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Australia’s red and yellow beach flags can confuse tourists. Is it time to change them?
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
15 points (82.6% liked)
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The problem seems to be "no one knows what they mean" so uh, how is changing them going to correct that, exactly?
There's a good argument to be made for intuitive design. Red means danger, green means safe. That's a pretty worldwide understanding. Yellow means caution; that's a little less universal, but still pretty common.
There are, in my opinion, good reasons to not say "safe" at the beach under any circumstances, so I don't think using green flags is a great idea, but that doesn't mean some other form of tweaking is inappropriate.
caution-danger sounds like a good colour combo for the beach eh, especially if we're looking out for clueless tourists who think the ocean is a big bathtub.
Sure, but without a danger-danger elsewhere, a caution-danger might reasonably be interpreted as "don't swim here"