pxx.fi - what is it?
In a nutshell, a website for a small project. The project is mostly combined of travelling, photography, history and geography.
Please, enlighten me more?
A certain slightly foolish person, px, travels around the country of Finland photographing the municipality signs found beside roads and railways at the borders of these small regions. By car, by bike, even by foot.
Once in the past, the signs were as shown in the pic left to this text. These are quite rare nowadays, as the newer design of these signs has stepped along. The old style signs had the names and coats of arms for both municipality. As you see in the pic left, the other region has had its sign removed. That's because they've invested in a sign of new style.
The old style signs can however still be spotted around Finland, mostly beside smaller (common) roads, where no one has had the interest or bother to remove and replace these with new ones. For having the new style signs, the municipalities also have to pay a small maintenance cost to the Finnish Road Administration, Tiehallinto. That's also a possible reason why some unimportant roads still have old signs instead of new ones.
As the project had been alive for a year, I reached my first goal. I had the new style sign photos of every municipality. Of course, you can always take better photos, so this project was nowhere near ending.
The current goal of this project is to find the old style signs of all Finnish municipalities, which however, is most probably depressingly impossible. During the project, I've travelled tens and hundreds of thousands of kilometres around Finland searching for these and I'm still missing many many old style signs.
Wow. Could I help you somehow?
Most certainly. If you have any idea, where an old style sign (that I'm still missing) could be spotted, please, please drop me a line at tip(ät)pxx.fi or to px on IRCNet. Comments and corrections are also welcome. If you know of a sign that's of an already expired municipality, I'd be even more interested.
So, here you can find the so-far results of my small project, having started on June 2, 2003 and continuing till the end of my life :)
Finnish TV channel MTV3 aired a news report on the subject 23.09.2006
-px
