Colorado Road Signs and Their Meanings

Colorado will let you sit the knowledge test at your own kitchen table, and it will watch you while you do it. The @Home Driving Knowledge Test runs on a desktop or laptop with a front-facing camera, and the camera is not optional — the DMV's page says why in four words: "This helps us ensure the integrity of the tests results." A photo is captured before the test can begin, more are captured at random while it runs, and at your follow-up appointment a licensing technician compares those images with the person standing at the counter. You get sixty minutes. You may sit it twice in one day and as many times overall as you need. Passing it finishes nothing on its own: you still book an appointment at a state driver license office and bring the certificate of completion, on paper or on a screen.

Nothing in Colorado reserves a share of that test for signs. The handbook's whole description of what the questions cover is one sentence — "The test questions cover the contents of this handbook including road signs, driving under the influence, driving rules, safety rules and legal items" — which names road signs first in a list of five subjects and attaches no proportion to any of them. What Colorado leaves out is more unusual than what it puts in. Neither the handbook nor dmv.colorado.gov states how many questions the test holds or what score passes it. The @Home page is where the state is most forthcoming about this exam — it prices it, times it, caps you at two sittings a day and explains its own anti-fraud photography — and even there, no question count and no pass mark appear. Where a practice paper needs a length in order to exist, this one borrows a plausible shape — twenty-five questions, twenty of them right — and the borrowing is ours rather than Colorado's. Treat every sign as reachable, because nothing in the published record narrows the field for you.

The book is the Colorado Driver Handbook, stamped DR 2337 (12/05/24) in its own footer. It has no chapters — the contents are a flat list of capitalised headings — and signs sit under TRAFFIC CONTROLS, between TRAFFIC SIGNALS and PAVEMENT MARKINGS. TRAFFIC SIGNS starts on page seven; PAVEMENT MARKINGS starts on page nine. A note just before them explains how the pictures are laid out: "Visual representations of traffic signals and road signs are grouped together by relevance on pages 7, 8 and 9." Inside that short run the handbook works through a long list of named types — regulatory, speed limit, stop, yield, Do Not Enter/Wrong Way, One Way, lane control, prohibited, warning, advisory speed, railroad crossings, railroad emergency notification, work zone, guide, service/recreation, route markers — and then does something few driver handbooks bother with: it gives bicycles three separate entries. Bicycle and pedestrian crossing signs, the three-foot passing sign and Bicycle May Use Full Lane signs each get their own paragraph, and the slow-moving vehicle marker and disabled parking signs close the section out.

One question in this Colorado set is about a sign whose rule holds whether or not the sign is there. The handbook's entry for the marker that demands three feet of clearance for a bicyclist — white background, black letters and symbols — closes by saying that a motorist passing or overtaking a bicyclist must leave that clearance "on all roadways even if a sign is not posted." Recognizing the sign is the easy half; the point worth carrying away is that this marker records a duty rather than creating one, so its absence changes nothing about what you owe the rider in front of you. The rest of the set stays inside the traffic-signs pages except where it reaches the railroad material, and that reach is fair: Colorado covers railroad crossings twice, once as entries in the sign list and again as a section of its own much later in the book. Whichever of the two you read first, read the other as well.

14 published Colorado road-sign questions, each with an explanation and a citation to the handbook section it came from.

Content reviewed against official driver handbooks · August 12, 2026