THE United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) has been successfully pushing the harmonisation of road signs and signals into Soviet Union countries.

Widely supported in western Europe, Kyrgyzstan has become the 54th contracting party to the 1968 Convention on Road Signs and Signals, leaving only Armenia and Azerbaijan to sign up in the ex-USSR.

UNECE hails the convention as a key road safety measure, prescribing the appearance of danger signs, priority signs, regulatory signs, informative signs and traffic lights, although Britain, Spain, Portugal and other European countries are not signatories. It said it would enable international traffic to understand these signs.