Posted on 09/30/2010 12:34:11 PM PDT by JoeProBono
NEW YORK, - New York officials said it will cost about $27.5 million to replace all of the city's street signs to conform to national standards.
The New York City Department of Transportation said the signs, which feature street names in all capital letters, will be replaced with signs featuring both capital and lower-case letters and they will be printed in a font called Clearview, the New York Daily News reported Thursday.
The Federal Highway Administration said the new sign standards improve safety because they allow drivers to identify words more quickly, allowing them to swiftly bring their eyes back to the road.
The Transportation Department said it expects to have 11,000 of its 250,000 street signs replaced by the end of the year. Officials said the task should be fully completed by 2018.
Sounds like no one in DOT has ever been in NYC.
Nothing like having your priorities in order, eh?
All of them to say, UhrBummer is Great!uhrBummer is good, Let us thank him for our food, by His hands we all are fed, I’d feel better if he gave me bread..
A new 10 commandments set
Based on Uhrbummer
That is a stupid waste of money. That being said, if they were smart (which means I don’t expect them to do this), they should auction off the street signs they are taking down. That Wall St. one, for instance, I bet would fetch quite a bit from a collector. Broadway is another I’d expect would sell well.
classic make work
And surely by 2018 all will.
Makework.
I loath the new signs I've seen. They (A) are not as readable (Helvetica for better or worse has been the standard for all sorts of typography for over 4 decades, there's even a documentary available on DVD through netflix and elsewhere titled simply HELVETICA). And (B), the signs I am seeing are not even reflective. So you can't see them as far down the road.
How many people would love to own a real "Broadway" or "Madison Av" or "Wall St." or "Herald Sq" or "East 161st St"?
Probably quite a few.
Maybe they could break a bunch of windows and replace them. This is the same thing. Cf. Bastiat.
Pure lunacy
It’s not just NYC, folks, it’s the whole damned country!!
From the FAQ of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways
“14.Q: Can lettering on street name signs still be done in all upper case letters?
A: No, lettering for place names and destinations on all guide signs, including Street Name signs, shall be in mixed case lettering with the 1st letter in upper case followed by lower case lettering. This is because mixed case lettering has better recognition and legibility distances than all upper case lettering for place names and destinations. The minimum letter heights for Street Name signs given in Section 2D.45 refer to the height of the initial upper case letter.”
http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/knowledge/faqs/faq_part2.htm#q14
That would be a typeface called Clearview, not a font. I know most people don't care, but typographers and printers know what I'm talking about.
I thought New Yorkers had cajones ... They should tell the Gubmint to stick their mandate where the sun don’t shine!
Actually this is the classic case of what happens when you have too many bureaucrats with too much time on their hands figuring they have to write some new regulations or solve some other miniscule problem. This government is so far out of control, it will take a direct hit by an astroid to get rid of it, its entrenched tenacles and its leeches. We now see clearly why there were enumerated powers. A return to just them would be fine and would cure the problem but right now there is no constraint what totalitarian despots can and will do.
This act needs to be amended.
Signs should also be posted halfway down the pole in braille so that vertically challenged and vision impaired people can both see them and read them.
Cost is always an easy target but this mania for uniformity and central planning has got to go.
When you travel what do you notice? The Wal-Marts? The McDonald’s? Hell no - they’re everywhere.
Why is local flavor and/or design of a regional nature automatically a bad thing?
This should be so far down on the list of things to do it would be out of sight(depending on the font size).
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