Flutterby™! : Pedestrian illiteracy

Part of John Taylor Gatto's thesis in The Underground History of American Education is that mandatory government-funded education has actually reduced literacy rates (an argument I've seen evidence of before). I don't know if this is a reasonable sample, but the number of people who can't figure out what the signs pictured here indicate is absolutely amazing. I'm also unwilling to draw conclusions from this little data, but it appears, based on their responses to these signs, that bicyclists tend to have a much higher literacy rate than pedestrians.