Thanks Paul. I should have been more specific in my question, for what purpose are distances shown on the road? Where I live there are no markings on the roads but distance from a base is recorded for all road infrastructure, signs, culverts, bridges, overpasses etc and this is used for ID of plans of these items & for maintenance & repair. In the country where there are gravel roads houses are even numbered for the left hand side of the road and odd numbers are used for the right and the number represents the number of metres from the turnoff to that road, rounded to the nearest 10 metres. Eg house number 1560 is 1.56 km from the turnoff on the left side of the road. This assists locating a house for emergency services as well as for the public. But the numbers are not shown on the road, but on the premises (well usually). I presume numbers stamped onto the road surface serve the same purpose, albeit labour intensive and no doubt costly. Hence the question, why bother unless there is quite a compelling reason .... that being ?