As the organizer of Herd Summer Racing, which @OleKristian referred to in the beginning -
I’d turn off a big overhead banner for the start of segment. The line on the road is sufficient - I’d be fine if the pylon at the side of the road was a little taller so it could be seen in a big group though.
Course knowledge is a thing, I don’t want to take away the benefit for people who do recce.
@Craig_D_Mart There are certainly different opinions about that. It should obviously not be up to the race organizer to decide 
(I’m saying this as a racer in your events (for now)). Would you turn off the elevation profile and the map if you could? Racers want metrics, they want to know when the climb starts by looking at the elevation profile, they want more data. Look how popular SfZ has become for racers.
honestly if you could just turn off the floating name tags above people’s heads then it would be easy enough to see them already
Not in a big group, no. Unless you are at the front.
I don’t see why course knowledge wouldn’t still be a factor to a significant degree. It would just be a less significant degree. The request as I see it isn’t for a banner or sign that says “start to get up to speed now because the sprint start is coming soon”, and it’s not for a sprint start sign where there is no sprint start sign. It’s just for a larger sprint start sign.
Given turns in the course, even larger sprint start signs/banners/pylons still won’t always been visible at the point when you’ll want to start ramping up your speed. So course knowledge will still be an advantage.
But clearly Zwift wants people to see where the sprint start is. They do have the glowing line, and the pylons. It’s just that, in a bunch in particular, not everyone can see it. So it’s a feature that gives a benefit to people in the front of the group, regardless of their knowledge of the course.
To put it another way, of these three options, one of them makes the least sense:
You create signs for a purpose, but partially thwart that purpose with their design. If you want people to rely on course knowledge alone, just get rid of the markers entirely. The markers now ensure that some people can rely on both course knowledge and signage, while others only have course knowledge to rely on.
Doozers do the building - Fraggles tend to knock things over in their general excitement.
Just a banner hanging over the road is fine. Like in the real road races in the real world outside.
Hope not. Banners and signs across the road have been banned by the UCI except at the start and finish. To many cases of them either falling onto the road (or occasionally trapping team buses).
Given that the leaderboards appear well in advance of the start of each sprint/segment, couldn’t Zwift just add a distance countdown to those? That way it’s no more intrusive than what we’ve already got, which seems to be important for some people.
They should just put a green banner over the road.
The London Classique course has a 1k banner to the finish.
That is completely redundant because the HUD already has a count down to the finish.
Now, adding a sprint start banner, one that would really serve a purpose - that is just CRAZY talk.
If you ride without the HUD, you don’t see the leaderboard.