The point of shared space is to remove the need for signs. The whole environment should give the message to the driver that there is no obvious priority of passage for them so they have to pay attention to their surroundings. Or rather the absence of the great simplification of the environment that would otherwise be offered by conventional highway design (including warning signs) makes high speeds impossible.
Of course this goes against "common sense". We have had decades of engineering measures (guard railings, white painted lane markings, smooth curves, visibility splays, official crossing points and so on). The effect of these has always to facilitate high speed traffic by giving drivers a great deal of certainty of their way ahead, and pass the entire responsibility for safety onto everybody else to keep out of their path. All this has been sold to us on the basis of "road safety", but the effect is always to marginalise non-motorised traffic for the convenience of drivers.
If you look at some of the neanderthal attitudes from Lib Dem Councilors quoted in the report:
"Someone could drive along the rest of the seafront and enter the area without knowing. What would happen then if they hit somebody?"
"Would they have a defence because of the lack of warning and the fact it is still legally a road?”
You can see that their real concern the poor motorists (Jeremy Clarkson is also a prominent opponent of shared space). The attitude is that it is perfectly OK to hit people on normal roads.
Now looking at some of the photos with the signs it doesn't look at all like shared space - just like a conventional road with all the traditional highway engineering paraphanalia - kerbs, traffic lights, cattle pens and so on to keep all those pesky pedestrians firmly in their place. It won't become a shared space simply by putting up a sign. This suggests that either the designers haven't a clue what shared space entails or the sign writers haven't a clue where the shared space is.
