The Clearview Subject

[1995hoo]

Clearview v. Gothic. For those unfamiliar with the road, the sign on the left is over the reversible center carriageway.

[Brandon]

^^ To my eyes, there is no discernible difference in legibility.

[hbelkins]

Clearview v. Gothic. For those unfamiliar with the road, the sign on the left is over the reversible center carriageway.

Heh. I got a picture of that very same sign assembly a couple of weeks ago and noted that one had Clearview and one didn't.

[Bobby5280]

I'll offer my 2¢ on the topic since I am a graphic designer that does most of his work designing commercial signs, billboards, etc. for businesses. I'm still fairly new at this forum, so I had to read through this thread about Clearview from page 1.

A lot of what I'm seeing discussed about Clearview vs Series 2000 Gothic honestly just comes down to a matter of taste. The old "highway gothic" typeface has a nostalgic feel to it. Some people think it looks dated. Clearview looks like a highway typeface, but has a more contemporary appearance. Some people think it looks ugly.

I like how Clearview looks in some uses. I own a license for both the "W" and "B" series typefaces and have used the fonts on things like wayfinding signs, labels on map illustrations and a variety of other things with a technical-informative feel to them.

I think the FHWA jumped the gun at least in some regard to specifying new typefaces for use on traffic signs, particularly highway signs. They had an opportunity, via OpenType font technology, to clear up some glaring problems with highway lettering (due in part to new MUTCD rules) -which could have been included in the Clearview font files. But that didn't happen. And I suspect that's because they didn't get input from other professional type designers and type experts about it.

OpenType allows for vastly expanded character sets. Series 2000 has a minimal character set. Clearview has a larger, but still fairly basic, Latin-only character set (including accented characters) good for North America and most of Western Europe. It doesn't have extra alphabets to cover Greek, Cyrillic or other character ranges like one often sees in most new commercial typefaces.

Highway signs use fake large/small capital arrangements on cardinal directions and anything else requiring a large cap-small cap treatment. The larger capital letter has a letter stroke thicker than the smaller capital letters to the right of it. That looks lousy. A typeface with true small capitals will have uniform, consistent looking letter strokes. Clearview should have had a "SC" set embedded in the font files and accessible to graphics applications that are fully OpenType capable.

Clearview does have a complete fraction set, but it is set up more to look good rather than conform to how sign designers and fabricators spec and install fraction numerals on highway signs. The fraction slash falls below the base line and extends above the "M" height line of the capital letters. That's standard for most typefaces. A highway sign fraction slash is supposed to be the same height as a capital letter. Clearview's superscript and subscript numerals rise above the M height line and fall below the base line. This approach is very standard and even recommended for most commercial typefaces seen in print or on computer screens. But you can't numerally call out the placement of those numbers on a highway sign design plan sheet. Highway sign designers have had to create their own clip art files of corrected fractions to put in place of Clearview's stock fractions. OpenType could have solved this fractions problem through extended character sets and OTF programming.

Whenever I'm buying a new typeface or typeface family I look carefully at what OTF features are included within the font files. Above all else the typeface has to look good and be useful, but more OpenType features that are included will make the typeface even more useful. I look for lots of alternate characters in any script typeface. I want true small cap character sets in most any sans or serif type family (although it's not a total deal breaker if the font looks good enough). The more alphabets and diacritics that are included will make it cover far more non-English words.

I have a feeling we'll be facing another type change for highway signs in the coming years over this issue. I wouldn't be surprised if companies like Google got involved with it. Afterall, Google is doing a lot of work developing open source type families.

Things could eventually go in another direction too: cars and portable devices become sophisticated enough and so aware of their location the highway signs are no longer needed. That would be a little disappointing to me in one respect since the big green signs are part of what makes a super highway look like a superhighway.

[PHLBOS]

Things could eventually go in another direction too: cars and portable devices become sophisticated enough and so aware of their location the highway signs are no longer needed. That would be a little disappointing to me in one respect since the big green signs are part of what makes a super highway look like a superhighway.

Several comments regarding the above:

1.  Not everyone owns (nor will own) a new car equipped w/such (still option on most models today) nor have an aftermarket portable device.  I, for one, fall in this category.

2.  Should such a system crap out or go dead on a car (example: Ford's MyTouch freeze-ups); one would be up sh*t creek without the presence of signs. 

3.  I've seen more users making mistakes (some of them either costly or near-fatal (last year's bus collision w/a low overpass along Soldiers Field Road in Boston)) w/those devices than without them; note my signature below.

4.  I work in a firm whose clients include several DOTs & road agencies as clients (PennDOT, PTC, NJDOT, NJTA, DelDOT being several examples); and I have never heard of any plans to eliminate BGS' and the like it is my understanding that those aren't going anywhere, anytime soon.

5.  Personal prediction/speculation: I believe there will eventually be some sort of a push-back from either consumers or more likely law enforcement regarding the over-dependence on these devices and/or these devices causing more distracted-driving-related issues.

[Bobby5280]

I don't think in-dash navigation systems will disappear, although I think they're a costly add-on to vehicles. Google Maps in my Android phone is just as good, if not better.

Car manufacturers are actively working on cars that drive themselves. A few different cars available today can parallel park automatically. While the scenario of self driving cars seems scary in certain respects, what we're dealing with today is every bit as scary with legions of distracted drivers not keeping their eyes on the road. It could be at least another 10 or 20 years before self driving capable cars are available to the public. But such cars will be in widespread use sometime in the future. By that time if traffic signs are still around they probably won't be quite so big and conspicuous.

Highway signs are pretty expensive to build, especially the overhead BGS variety. The materials are not cheap at all. Considering how much these signs cost and the purpose the signs are serving to the public one would think greater levels of sophistication and quality control would go into their designs and sign panel fabrication.

Honestly the typefaces used on highway signs should be every bit as advanced as some of the fonts I use in making signs for businesses. The FHWA should not have pushed that new large capital rule on cardinal directions if none of the highway fonts were designed to handle it correctly. The current implementation only looks stupid. If Clearview Highway and Series Gothic 2000 were marketed to mainstream graphic designers they would fail miserably in terms of sales due to so many of the features they lack.

There is no shortage of ugly, erroneous traffic signs in use along streets & highways today. The traffic sign errors thread is 111 pages long and probably could be hundreds of pages long if it tried to catalog every traffic sign goof in the United States.

Badly designed, badly fabricated traffic signs are protected to some degree by the bureaucracy that governs them. They're immune from sign ordinances that affect commercial signs for businesses. If a state agency installs a big green sign that turns out to be a big panel of eye pollution there's really not much an average person can do. His complaints will likely be ignored or he'll get back an excuse that a certified professional engineer designed the sign and that makes it correct. It doesn't matter to me if a bad sign was designed by a highly experienced P.E. or a 20 year old amateur, a bad sign is still a bad sign.

I try to do as good as job as I can with designing signs for commercial businesses. I don't want to slough off something ugly I'm gonna have to see next to the street for the next 10-20 years. I don't want to inspire citizens and city council members to draft anti-signs ordinances that greatly limit what I can do. It's in my best interest to do a good job.

Traffic signs are vital to streets and highways. They're necessary whether they look nice or hideous. But technology is slowly making them less necessary. Highway sign fabricators probably don't have to worry about losing any work any time very soon. But if they want the work to continue flowing into the shop 20 years from now when auto piloted cars are becoming the next big thing they better start doing a better job. Or voters are going to see those big green signs as a cost that can be cut.

[Scott5114]

A few notes on your post...

I think the FHWA jumped the gun at least in some regard to specifying new typefaces for use on traffic signs, particularly highway signs. They had an opportunity, via OpenType font technology, to clear up some glaring problems with highway lettering (due in part to new MUTCD rules) -which could have been included in the Clearview font files. But that didn't happen. And I suspect that's because they didn't get input from other professional type designers and type experts about it.

FHWA didn't actually develop Clearview. It was developed by a commercial font designer, with some research to improve it done by university transportation research teams in Texas and Pennsylvania. So really, the OpenType features you mention should be present. That being said, I don't know how useful they would be. I don't know what the software stack used for commercial sign work looks like, but highway signs aren't done up in Illustrator–they use specialized CAD programs (usually SignCAD or GuidSIGN, the latter of which is used by Oklahoma), which may not support OpenType features.

FHWA still has not officially given its stamp of approval to Clearview–they refused to endorse it in the 2009 MUTCD–but instead agencies must request an "interim approval" clearing them to experiment with the typeface. FHWA can revoke that approval at any time, which might happen if studies showing Clearview's benefits to be negligible continue to be published.

OpenType allows for vastly expanded character sets. Series 2000 has a minimal character set. Clearview has a larger, but still fairly basic, Latin-only character set (including accented characters) good for North America and most of Western Europe. It doesn't have extra alphabets to cover Greek, Cyrillic or other character ranges like one often sees in most new commercial typefaces.

This is not necessarily a feature of OpenType; TrueType fonts can, to my knowledge, support any number of glyphs. The limitations are due to character set (not much of an issue now that we have Unicode everywhere) and the patience of the font designer to draw up all of the glyphs. It is the latter that is responsible for the limited number of glyphs in FHWA Series font implementations. The font as we know it today was first published circa 1948 as a set of outlines in a hard-copy Standard Highway Signs book. At the time, little thought was given to anything not on an English typewriter, and had there been, chances are it would have been rejected for space reasons anyway. Everything being non-computerized then gave a bit of flexibility to the typeface–rather than designing a É glyph, you could take the basic Latin E and put an apostrophe over it at an appropriate angle. Since the typeface was designed for road signs, there was little demand for most of those characters anyway–for legibility reasons, punctuation is usually omitted, and accents and tildes are typically dropped.

Highway signs use fake large/small capital arrangements on cardinal directions and anything else requiring a large cap-small cap treatment. The larger capital letter has a letter stroke thicker than the smaller capital letters to the right of it. That looks lousy. A typeface with true small capitals will have uniform, consistent looking letter strokes. Clearview should have had a "SC" set embedded in the font files and accessible to graphics applications that are fully OpenType capable.

I agree that this is somewhat of a problem, made more prevalent by the simplicity of scaling characters up or down by computer. This seemed to be less of an issue when everything was designed and set by hand; it is much less noticeable on older Kansas signage using demountable copy characters.

[PHLBOS]

By that time if traffic signs are still around they probably won't be quite so big and conspicuous.

You are aware that highway signs are as large as they are due to the necessity of being read from a distance as well as travelling at higher rates of speeds than non-highways.  One old Rand McNally write-up (circa 1970) on the interstate system indicated a typical driver going 65-to-70 mph has only about 11 seconds to read & react to a given BGS' messages.

As far as everything heading towards automation is concerned; while some of your fore-mentioned items are indeed along the way, public reaction to them is still unknown yet.  Case-and-point; the public flat out rejected talking cars when such were offered during the 1980s.  Personally, I could see similar reaction towards driver-less cars.  While self-parking is available on some car models; such automation is done for only a short period of time (a few minutes) and at a significantly lower operating speed.  It's not like the self-park feature is operating at 70 mph of a couple of hours or even a half-hour.  Big difference between that and any self-driving feature being proposed.

[J N Winkler]

You are aware that highway signs are as large as they are due to the necessity of being read from a distance as well as travelling at higher rates of speeds than non-highways.  One old Rand McNally write-up (circa 1970) on the interstate system indicated a typical driver going 65-to-70 mph has only about 11 seconds to read & react to a given BGS' messages.

There is some room for devil's advocacy here, though.  The MUTCD specifies a minimum capital letter height of 6" for conventional roads, which in the US can be highways with speed limits of up to 75 MPH.  The MUTCD also specifies a minimum capital letter height (for primary destination legends on action signs) of 16" for freeways, which can have speed limits as low as 50 MPH.  We have had formulas to relate sign lettering size to word count, lateral placement, and operating speed since the late 1930's when T.W. Forbes developed them, but even 70 years later the MUTCD standards are not particularly well rationalized.

As far as everything heading towards automation is concerned; while some of your fore-mentioned items are indeed along the way, public reaction to them is still unknown yet.  Case in point:  the public flat out rejected talking cars when such were offered during the 1980s.  Personally, I could see similar reaction towards driver-less cars.  While self-parking is available on some car models; such automation is done for only a short period of time (a few minutes) and at a significantly lower operating speed.  It's not like the self-park feature is operating at 70 mph of a couple of hours or even a half-hour.  Big difference between that and any self-driving feature being proposed.

I am much more sanguine about the potential for automation.  Google has been developing self-driving cars which have accumulated hundreds of thousands of miles under automatic operation with no crashes other than those that have occurred as a result of a human driver overriding the system and then making a mistake.  The current focus of development is on getting the self-driving system past the "six sigma" point (in this case, collisions no more frequent than one per several million miles), at which point it will likely be rolled out to production and states other than California and Nevada will be forced to consider the adjustments to legal norms that then become necessary.

[Bobby5280]

FHWA didn't actually develop Clearview. It was developed by a commercial font designer, with some research to improve it done by university transportation research teams in Texas and Pennsylvania. So really, the OpenType features you mention should be present. That being said, I don't know how useful they would be. I don't know what the software stack used for commercial sign work looks like, but highway signs aren't done up in Illustrator–they use specialized CAD programs (usually SignCAD or GuidSIGN, the latter of which is used by Oklahoma), which may not support OpenType features.

I didn't say the FHWA developed Clearview, or even Series 2000 Gothic. However, the FHWA was the organization that had to evaluate and provide the go-ahead for those typefaces (the interim use of Clearview on positive contrast legends and Series 2000 Gothic for everything). The FHWA missed some things.

OpenType has been around since the late 1990s. Many commercial typefaces have been re-worked, expanded in terms of features and character sets and re-generated in OpenType. The folks at the FHWA should have been aware of this. And maybe they were, but they obviously didn't think the unique features of OpenType were important enough to push into the features of highway sign typefaces.

SignCAD and GuidSign are only geared to support TrueType and specifically the Series Gothic and Clearview type families. Their main attraction is all the templates, libraries, etc. that speed up highway sign fabrication. On the fundamental object creation and editing level both applications are very primitive compared to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Sorry if I offend anyone with that, but if those applications actually beat Illustrator and Corel in terms of creative features and object editing accuracy the vendors selling SignCAD and GuidSign would be trying to sell their applications to a lot more than just people fabricating traffic signs.

Our sign shop uses FlexiCloud and EnRoute. Flexi at least can support OpenType. It also supports different object drawing modes, like Bezier curves from Illustrator or CorelDRAW artwork, arc & line based artwork from AutoCAD and spline-based lines from other programs. It has had to support all those object drawing modes due in part of gobbling up other sign making software companies. We can open our 1990's era CASmate sign files in Flexi without a hitch. Flexi has an incredibly large "art board," big enough to hold entire building elevations at full size without any problem. Still, for creative capabilities, I and the other designers in my shop, use Illustrator and Corel for most of the design work. Trade specific applications like Flexi, Roland VersaWorks and EnRoute are used to output jobs for specific materials. I'm not going to run a vinyl cutter from Illustrator when Flexi can do a better job of it. Same goes for EnRoute with routing tables or VersaWorks for controlling a large format printer.

This is not necessarily a feature of OpenType; TrueType fonts can, to my knowledge, support any number of glyphs. The limitations are due to character set (not much of an issue now that we have Unicode everywhere) and the patience of the font designer to draw up all of the glyphs. It is the latter that is responsible for the limited number of glyphs in FHWA Series font implementations. The font as we know it today was first published circa 1948 as a set of outlines in a hard-copy Standard Highway Signs book. At the time, little thought was given to anything not on an English typewriter, and had there been, chances are it would have been rejected for space reasons anyway. Everything being non-computerized then gave a bit of flexibility to the typeface–rather than designing a É glyph, you could take the basic Latin E and put an apostrophe over it at an appropriate angle. Since the typeface was designed for road signs, there was little demand for most of those characters anyway–for legibility reasons, punctuation is usually omitted, and accents and tildes are typically dropped.

When the FHWA started mandating things in recent MUTCD editions, like a large capital for all caps cardinal directions they were mandating something that either required the use of a true small capitals typeface or the use of an OpenType based font that contained both standard uppercase/lowercase character sets AND small capitals character sets. The FHWA did neither. The FHWA may believe their new rule on how cardinal directions are drawn is more legible, but I can say, with authority, the end results look bad. The old method (caps all the same size) looked better. The FHWA shouldn't be dictating large/small caps treatments on traffic signs if the fonts can't correctly support it.

Clearview has a somewhat expanded character set compared to stock 1990's era TrueType fonts. Terminal Design even advertises the font files as being OpenType. But when I purchased my W and B series fonts several years ago the files I downloaded were TrueType font files, not OpenType. They make you choose a specific platform, Mac or PC. True OTF fonts are cross-platform compatible. Our shop uses Windows-based PCs by the way.

SignCAD boasts how it has external spacing tables for Series Gothic fonts, rather than relying on the level of built in kerning of the font files. Honestly, that's a kludge. OpenType fonts can contain multiple spacing tables and do so with perfect accuracy. A lot of top of the line OTF type families have font files with thousands upon thousands of kerning pairs and multiple spacing tables, like standard, tabulature and lining figures spacing. On top of that, applications like Adobe Illustrator and InDesign have their own optical spacing systems that can override the built in features of a font file if you prefer. It works pretty well, especially on numerals. I simply cannot stand seeing numerals displayed on signs that aren't spaced properly. Most applications will default numeral spacing to column based spacing for stuff like math equations and tables. That kind of spacing looks horrible if you're just typing out a phone number, date, address or something else with numerals in display copy or body copy.

You are aware that highway signs are as large as they are due to the necessity of being read from a distance as well as travelling at higher rates of speeds than non-highways.

Yes, I am keenly aware of this thing. I deal with customers trying to make their business signs cheaper by shrinking the signs smaller and making all the copy smaller. Or they get attached to some pretty wedding script typeface somebody put on their business card, "make my sign with this pretty font!" I have to convince them, politely, they're making ill-informed choices that threaten to make their signs absolutely useless. Honestly, I deal with a lot more difficulties in maintaining sign legibility than any traffic engineer has to deal with.

Nevertheless, if automation takes over much of the control on the roads, and anybody can instantly tell what street they're on anyway by way of other methods (phones, computers, HUDs on the windshield, etc.) signs are going to become less and less necessary.

I'm already worrying a bit about this with my own job. And for commercial businesses, their store front signs are really their most important marketing tool by far.

As far as everything heading towards automation is concerned; while some of your fore-mentioned items are indeed along the way, public reaction to them is still unknown yet.  Case-and-point; the public flat out rejected talking cars when such were offered during the 1980s.

Today millions of smart phone users have their phones talking to them, giving them driving directions, in their cars. Higher priced in-dash navigation systems do the same thing. Many new cars have back-up cameras and alarms that sound when you're backing too close to something, even a street curb. Drivers are slowly yielding over control of their cars more and more to computers. Sheesh, you practically can't do any work on a new car without hooking it up to a computer.

Regarding public reaction to automation, I think they'll go right along with it if the feature is sold right. Honestly, I wouldn't mind being able to put my truck into "auto-pilot" for at least 400 miles of the 600 miles I drive between Oklahoma and Colorado to visit family. I wouldn't mind climbing into my vehicle and snoozing or watching movies while the vehicle chauffeured me there. I could leave any hour of the evening and not worry about falling asleep behind the wheel.

Legal issues may force more of this automation to take control. Traffic accidents cost the country many billions of dollars every year. If millions of cars were driving automatically they would be observing speed limits, traffic signals and other vehicles better than us humans are managing. It could cause insurance rates to drop. Or it could make owning a manual drive only car a whole lot more expensive to insure.

When I think about this sort of thing I think about what attorneys have done to swimming pools in the United States. Pools are boring now. You can't install a diving board or even a small water slide on a swimming pool in your own back yard on your own private property without insurance companies price gouging the hell out of you. If I smack my head on a swimming pool diving board at someone else's house it's honestly only 100% my fault. Somehow lawyers made it the pool owner's fault. Lawyers are taking the fun out of everything. They'll eventually take the fun out of driving cars too.

[PHLBOS]

Sheesh, you practically can't do any work on a new car without hooking it up to a computer.

Ain't that the truth.  That's one reason why I tend to hold on to my current cars as long as I can.

Regarding public reaction to automation, I think they'll go right along with it if the feature is sold right. Honestly, I wouldn't mind being able to put my truck into "auto-pilot" for at least 400 miles of the 600 miles I drive between Oklahoma and Colorado to visit family. I wouldn't mind climbing into my vehicle and snoozing or watching movies while the vehicle chauffeured me there. I could leave any hour of the evening and not worry about falling asleep behind the wheel.

Although Auto-Pilot been used in aviation applications for decades; there's still a human control element out there known as Air Traffic Controllers dictating where flights/planes are to be positioned.  Plus, Auto-Pilot does not control take-offs & landings.  Additionally on planes equipped w/Auto-Pilot, there's always a co-pilot stationed on board in case conditions warrant a need to shut off/override the feature if the pilot isn't available at that moment.  As far as I know, planes operated by just one pilot (usually small private types) are not equipped w/an Auto-Pilot feature.

Long story short; while automation exists & has existed in aviation for some time, there's still human control elements out there.  In contrast, what's being proposed in the automotive world is automation without any human control nor override.  I'm sorry but such a utopian approach is not only scary but flat out dangerous IMHO.

If you're familiar w/the original Star Trek, there was one episode during the show's 2nd season titled The Ultimate Computer that dealt with the issues of 100% automation head-on.  IMHO, such that episode turned out to be well ahead of its time (2 key clips included below).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=le3fUD62WH4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPMsyULnsM4

Legal issues may force more of this automation to take control. Traffic accidents cost the country many billions of dollars every year. If millions of cars were driving automatically they would be observing speed limits, traffic signals and other vehicles better than us humans are managing. It could cause insurance rates to drop. Or it could make owning a manual drive only car a whole lot more expensive to insure.

Again, that analysis is based on the utopian notion that everything will work properly 100% of the time.  I've already seen or read about drivers having blind faith w/their GPS devices be them in their vehicles, aftermarket models or ones on their Smart Phones and they make either the same or more mistakes than they did without using such.  While automation will take out the human/user error factor (at least those can be over-ridden) what will happen should something go wrong w/the automation itself?  Will there still be an available manual over-ride where the driver can just drive the vehicle manually should they want or need to?  If so, then signs (including BGS') will still be needed; hence, the original thread topic.

When I think about this sort of thing I think about what attorneys have done to swimming pools in the United States. Pools are boring now. You can't install a diving board or even a small water slide on a swimming pool in your own back yard on your own private property without insurance companies price gouging the hell out of you. If I smack my head on a swimming pool diving board at someone else's house it's honestly only 100% my fault. Somehow lawyers made it the pool owner's fault. Lawyers are taking the fun out of everything. They'll eventually take the fun out of driving cars too.

To a degree, they already did decades ago.  Attorneys & insurance companies played a role (they weren't the only ones, mind you) in forcing automakers (mainly the Big Three at the time) to abandon/scale back on performance to a point where muscle cars were essentially gone and the remaining pony & sports cars were virtually emasculated by the mid-1970s.  It would take decades for performance to return and even surpass those from the 60s.

[Bobby5280]

Although Auto-Pilot been used in aviation applications for decades; there's still a human control element out there known as Air Traffic Controllers dictating where flights/planes are to be positioned.  Plus, Auto-Pilot does not control take-offs & landings.  Additionally on planes equipped w/Auto-Pilot, there's always a co-pilot stationed on board in case conditions warrant a need to shut off/override the feature if the pilot isn't available at that moment.  As far as I know, planes operated by just one pilot (usually small private types) are not equipped w/an Auto-Pilot feature.

A passenger jet is a far more complex machine than an automobile. Co-pilots and air traffic controllers are necessary because the possible consequences of a plane crash are far more serious than a car crash. Aircraft take offs and landings are more complicated processes than pulling a car out of a driveway or parking it. Come to think of it, computers do a whole lot of work in controlling rocket launches.

The human element will never be entirely removed from the controls of an automobile. Cars wouldn't be very much fun at all to own if you could only be a passenger 100% of the time.

While automation will take out the human/user error factor (at least those can be over-ridden) what will happen should something go wrong w/the automation itself?

There are several technological issues that have to be overcome in order to allow thousands or millions of self-driving cars onto the roads. I'm sure the companies working on this stuff are factoring redundancy into the systems and dealing with lots of other "what if" scenarios. Like I said before, we're still at least 10-20 years from seeing these kinds of cars sold to the public.

You keep mentioning the word "utopia," but such a system could actually bring about dystopia if the data being collected by all of these network-connected self driving cars is abused. The government could start tracking people under the guise of fighting crime and then shift to political agenda. If someone is able to hack the system he could stalk anyone he chose. I worry about this kind of thing whether self driving cars become a reality or not.

Will there still be an available manual over-ride where the driver can just drive the vehicle manually should they want or need to?  If so, then signs (including BGS') will still be needed; hence, the original thread topic.

Some of this depends on features included in future automobiles and what technology does to other devices. If cars 20 years from now have transparent heads up displays painting information across the windshield a bunch of the traffic signs wouldn't be necessary. The same thing goes for a lot of commercial signs and billboards. Commercial buildings without signs would be an architect's wet dream (most of them don't like signs btw). Right now Google Glass seems like a pretty dorky thing. Eventually some company will make that stuff fashionable.

I am definitely NOT advocating the removal of traffic signs from the roads, commercial signs from businesses and off premise signs like billboards. However, I do worry about others who are actively working at eliminating them or greatly reducing them. I really hate ugly signs. I'm as harsh a sign critic as anyone. I understand where the anti-signs folks are coming from. Unfortunately they don't understand the benefits of well designed, well built signs. So they come up with blanket bans and broad rules that don't solve the problem. They just force all the signs to be a whole lot smaller and not any better looking. In the future these people could use technological advances as an excuse to ban signs.

Anyone designing signs must know the responsibility he has with affecting the outdoor visual landscape. Unless it's a temporary thing, like a banner, the item being installed will be out there for years. If it looks terrible it's going to keep looking terrible for years until it is removed or replaced.

[jbnv]

If it looks terrible it's going to keep looking terrible for years until it is removed or replaced.

If it looks bad when it's installed, it's probably not going to look better as nature weathers it.

[J N Winkler]

SignCAD and GuidSign are only geared to support TrueType and specifically the Series Gothic and Clearview type families. Their main attraction is all the templates, libraries, etc. that speed up highway sign fabrication. On the fundamental object creation and editing level both applications are very primitive compared to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Sorry if I offend anyone with that, but if those applications actually beat Illustrator and Corel in terms of creative features and object editing accuracy the vendors selling SignCAD and GuidSign would be trying to sell their applications to a lot more than just people fabricating traffic signs.

None of the commercial traffic sign drawing packages I am aware of (and that includes not just GuidSIGN and SignCAD for US use, but also Novapoint in Norway, KeySign and SignPlot in the UK, Sherpa and Corine in France, CarDim and Lena in Spain, etc.) aspires to be or even attempts to market itself as a CorelDRAW or Illustrator killer.  They are heavily geared for the narrow production environment of traffic sign design and fabrication, and in some senses they are better suited for this purpose than the commercial vector drawing packages.  US signs are actually pretty easy to do in CorelDRAW because the design standards by and large assume rectangular format with design elements being aligned either horizontally or vertically, but (to take one example) British map-type diagrammatics would be very hard to do in CorelDRAW, though not impossible, because the official guidelines call for elements (such as stub arms) at angles, as well as rounding of inside corners.

In regard to the graphic aspects of traffic sign design:  while FHWA may very well have missed a trick by not devising true small-caps typefaces to accommodate the higher initial letter in cardinal direction words, I can understand how that could easily have been a deliberate decision.  If you expand the toolset or the design requirements, you risk creating a skills bottleneck that in turn translates into quality-assurance failures when design work is handed to people that don't know the rules well enough to follow them correctly all or nearly all of the time.

Considered as a graphic design problem, devising a traffic signing system is not about making an attractive and functional sign, or even a series of attractive and functional signs, but rather establishing a set of rules that people with no formal training in graphic design can apply in a production environment without going under a minimum level of function or visual appeal.

A large part of the problem with Clearview in traffic signing contexts is that it is too complicated for poorly trained designers to use correctly.  Clearview comes with a much larger number of do's and don'ts than the FHWA series:  don't use Clearview at all in negative contrast; don't use B Clearview in positive contrast; don't use Clearview in route shields; if you break the rules and use Clearview in negative contrast, don't use W Clearview; align adjacent lines of legend by capital letter height and baseline, not height of letters with ascenders; etc.  These are all rules that can be broken and are routinely broken by undertrained and undersupervised technicians.  In contradistinction, the FHWA series are more foolproof--no separate B and W weights, no letters with ascenders taller than capital letter height, no requirement to use a separate type family for shields, no contrast distinction, etc.

This is not to say that Clearview or another type family couldn't be successfully rolled out to US traffic signs.  But in order for this to happen, any set of sign design rules that is devised to accommodate a new type family has to take account of the resources that are likely to be available for training, quality assurance, and quality control so that the finished signs are consistently of good quality.  It is as silly to hand complicated rules to the poorly trained and expect good results as it is to put a gold watch on a window seat and expect it to be ignored by smash-and-grab thieves.

[jakeroot]

Long story short; while automation exists & has existed in aviation for some time, there's still human control elements out there.  In contrast, what's being proposed in the automotive world is automation without any human control nor override.  I'm sorry but such a utopian approach is not only scary but flat out dangerous IMHO.

If you're familiar w/the original Star Trek, there was one episode during the show's 2nd season titled The Ultimate Computer that dealt with the issues of 100% automation head-on.  IMHO, such that episode turned out to be well ahead of its time (2 key clips included below).

Have you heard of Skynet? It became self aware and set off nuclear devices and killed almost everything on the face of the globe. You know what Star Trek and Skynet have in common? They're both fiction. They were made up by Gene Roddenberry and James Cameron, respectively. Computer's don't have a history of malfunctioning so severely as to lead to death of the operator. If some crazy computer invention in the 50s lead to some massive explosion at a lab in the middle of Kansas, killing everyone within 100 miles, I could see being slightly afraid of technology (i.e. technophobe). But because computers have such an impeccable record, there is no reason to promptly wag them off just because you've seen too many movies.

[Bobby5280]

US signs are actually pretty easy to do in CorelDRAW because the design standards by and large assume rectangular format with design elements being aligned either horizontally or vertically, but (to take one example) British map-type diagrammatics would be very hard to do in CorelDRAW, though not impossible, because the official guidelines call for elements (such as stub arms) at angles, as well as rounding of inside corners.

CorelDRAW has all the object editing/creation tools necessary to do that. The Fillet/Scallop/Chamfer docker will apply numerically sized operations to any corner. The application has a few different tools that allow for designing objects set at different angles. Adobe Illustrator isn't quite as well suited to technical drawing as CorelDRAW, but plug-ins like CADtools close the gap.

Considered as a graphic design problem, devising a traffic signing system is not about making an attractive and functional sign, or even a series of attractive and functional signs, but rather establishing a set of rules that people with no formal training in graphic design can apply in a production environment without going under a minimum level of function or visual appeal.

It does require at least some level of visual talent to design these signs properly & efficiently as well as be able to quickly spot mistakes. Someone with no visual talent will have a more difficult time spotting a quality control error than another person with talent who can naturally see that something just doesn't look right.

Traffic sign systems are related to wayfinding sign systems. It's very challenging to get a wayfinding sign system looking right and keeping it that way. The designs have to be clean, uncluttered and above all else consistent. If any element is improperly designed or placed it can tarnish the whole sign system. It's a very common thing for signs in hospitals, large businesses, etc. to start looking terrible if they have multiple sign companies making and replacing the signs. One sign company may care about doing the job right while another firm couldn't care less about following standards.

This is not to say that Clearview or another type family couldn't be successfully rolled out to US traffic signs.  But in order for this to happen, any set of sign design rules that is devised to accommodate a new type family has to take account of the resources that are likely to be available for training, quality assurance, and quality control so that the finished signs are consistently of good quality.  It is as silly to hand complicated rules to the poorly trained and expect good results as it is to put a gold watch on a window seat and expect it to be ignored by smash-and-grab thieves.

People who aren't qualified to design signs shouldn't be doing that kind of work. As visible as highway signs are on the landscape, and as expensive as they are, it's pretty critical to get them looking right. The companies/agencies designing and fabricating these signs should be careful about who they have doing the work.

It's not difficult at all to access OpenType characters in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW X6 & X7. A traffic sign typeface with full character sets for upper/lower case, true small capitals, alternative glyphs and other OTF features will solve a some design headaches. Some of the descenders in Clearview are pretty big, like the leg on a lowercase "g" for instance. That creates a problem on these new street name label signs requiring mixed case. If there were alternates for that "g" it might make a big difference on what size of sign panel would be needed.

[vdeane]

Airplane autopilots are LESS sophisticated than the proposed self-driving cars are.  The reason we have air traffic control is because airplane highways don't have pavement markings, road signs, etc. and planes don't talk to each other.  Self-driving cars will have none of these problems.  Also, autopilot can take off/land the plane, it just doesn't happen because pilots need to be skilled at performing these maneuvers.

There already people salivating at the prospect of requiring all cars to be automated all the time.  Some urbanists have even proposed abolishing private ownership of automobiles entirely and turning all vehicles into taxis.  Enough people hate driving and view cars as nothing more than a device to get from point A to point B that such proposals will likely have little resistance.

The government is already moving to track everyone.  License plate cameras are already being installed for the express purpose of tracking all cars.  Most proposals for replacing the gas tax include a mileage tax collected via GPS tracking.  Many new cars come with OnStar already included and impossible to remove.  And the courts have ruled that it's perfectly legal for the police to attach a GPS tracker to someone's car as long as it's not parked in a garage or a gated mansion (and since said GPS is powered by the car's battery, they're also stealing your electricity!).

[PHLBOS]

From the TTI study on E modified vs Clearview and "enhanced" E modified Thread:

Speaking of that, it appears FHWA may do such a thing.  They are apparently not granting anymore interim approvals to use Clearview - example of such a rejection

While the above doesn't yet address the issue regarding states that currently use Clearview; could such action occur later?  Stay tuned.

[roadman]

From the TTI study on E modified vs Clearview and "enhanced" E modified Thread:

Speaking of that, it appears FHWA may do such a thing.  They are apparently not granting anymore interim approvals to use Clearview - example of such a rejection

While the above doesn't yet address the issue regarding states that currently use Clearview; could such action occur later?  Stay tuned.

Given the huge backlash we saw over the new retroreflectivity rules, my prediction is that states that currently use Clearview in the proper manner won't be required to restore everything to E(m) immediately, but will be encouraged to accelerate their sign replacement programs to minimize the amount of time that Clearview legends remain.

Of course, I would expect that anything that doesn't presently conform - mainly Clearview negative contract signs (yes, I'm looking at you PA and TX) would have to be changed out as soon as possible.

[jakeroot]

From the TTI study on E modified vs Clearview and "enhanced" E modified Thread:

Speaking of that, it appears FHWA may do such a thing.  They are apparently not granting anymore interim approvals to use Clearview - example of such a rejection

While the above doesn't yet address the issue regarding states that currently use Clearview; could such action occur later?  Stay tuned.

Given the huge backlash we saw over the new retroreflectivity rules, my prediction is that states that currently use Clearview in the proper manner won't be required to restore everything to E(m) immediately, but will be encouraged to accelerate their sign replacement programs to minimize the amount of time that Clearview legends remain.

Of course, I would expect that anything that doesn't presently conform - mainly Clearview negative contract signs (yes, I'm looking at you PA and TX) would have to be changed out as soon as possible.

Unless the FHWA plans to fund those operations, the signs are staying until they wear out. The same way button copy is still around. The FHWA hasn't granted any approval for button copy in years (as far as I'm aware), but they didn't immediately force everyone to remove the signs.

With that said, if a person died as a direct result of the Clearview font, I could see the request for immediate removal. But of course, that's ridiculous.

[roadman]

Good points Jake.  However, given how litigious our society is these days, when the Clearview death knell is finally sounded, it may behoove state DOTS to at least replace any negative contract signs they made with Clearview, which have been documented by FHWA and others to have poorer nighttime contrast than with Highway Gothic signs with Highway Gothic signs.

[J N Winkler]

Unless the FHWA plans to fund those operations, the signs are staying until they wear out. The same way button copy is still around. The FHWA hasn't granted any approval for button copy in years (as far as I'm aware), but they didn't immediately force everyone to remove the signs.

The two are not quite comparable since button copy was a subsystem in sign manufacturing, not a separate typeface requiring FHWA approval.  And the retroreflectivity requirement will squeeze out button copy in time.

FHWA does make funding available for sign replacement, but since this is charged against the states' federal-aid allocations and so is not "free" money, there will be a lot of resistance at the state level to changing out brand-new Clearview freeway signs even if the federal government picks up 100% of the cost under one of the safety categories.  I anticipate that if the Clearview interim approval is cancelled (as now seems probable), there will be an extended phaseout period with the intent of allowing existing Clearview signs to remain until they are life-expired.  That will not take too long since the new retroreflectivity requirements tend to shorten sign replacement cycles.

[jakeroot]

Good points Jake.  However, given how litigious our society is these days, when the Clearview death knell is finally sounded, it may behoove state DOTS to at least replace any negative contract signs they made with Clearview, which have been documented by FHWA and others to have poorer nighttime contrast than with Highway Gothic signs with Highway Gothic signs.

I hate ambulance chasers. They take all the fun out of life! 

Unless the FHWA plans to fund those operations, the signs are staying until they wear out. The same way button copy is still around. The FHWA hasn't granted any approval for button copy in years (as far as I'm aware), but they didn't immediately force everyone to remove the signs.

The two are not quite comparable since button copy was a subsystem in sign manufacturing, not a separate typeface requiring FHWA approval.  And the retroreflectivity requirement will squeeze out button copy in time.

Fair enough. So it's in the same category as NYSDOT's rounding off of corners (which I love)?

FHWA does make funding available for sign replacement, but since this is charged against the states' federal-aid allocations and so is not "free" money, there will be a lot of resistance at the state level to changing out brand-new Clearview freeway signs even if the federal government picks up 100% of the cost under one of the safety categories.  I anticipate that if the Clearview interim approval is cancelled (as now seems probable), there will be an extended phaseout period with the intent of allowing existing Clearview signs to remain until they are life-expired.  That will not take too long since the new retroreflectivity requirements tend to shorten sign replacement cycles.

Since the FHWA's conclusion was that the difference between FHWA Series 2000 and Clearview was negligible (right?) and that Clearview was not found to be superior to FHWA Series 2000, it would seem either font should be acceptable. Each state should be allowed to do as it wishes. I'm approaching a different subject at this point so I'll just end now.

[J N Winkler]

Unless the FHWA plans to fund those operations, the signs are staying until they wear out. The same way button copy is still around. The FHWA hasn't granted any approval for button copy in years (as far as I'm aware), but they didn't immediately force everyone to remove the signs.

The two are not quite comparable since button copy was a subsystem in sign manufacturing, not a separate typeface requiring FHWA approval.  And the retroreflectivity requirement will squeeze out button copy in time.

Fair enough. So it's in the same category as NYSDOT's rounding off of corners (which I love)?

Yup.

Since the FHWA's conclusion was that the difference between FHWA Series 2000 and Clearview was negligible (right?) and that Clearview was not found to be superior to FHWA Series 2000, it would seem either font should be acceptable. Each state should be allowed to do as it wishes. I'm approaching a different subject at this point so I'll just end now.

To be frank, I would not object to a Clearview "freeze" where no new authorizations would be handed out but states that already use Clearview could continue to use it, subject to the signs being designed and fabricated in an acceptable manner (i.e., no capital letter/lowercase size mismatches, no negative-contrast Clearview, no Clearview in shields, none of the hundred and one mistakes that result from handing Clearview to under-trained technicians, etc.).  But I think a phaseout is more likely because once FHWA calls time on Clearview by revoking the interim approval, it will be regarded as a dead-end technology and not even the Clearview enthusiasts among the state DOTs will want to be tied to it.  The downside risks of such a commitment are just too great compared to the rewards.  In principle a state DOT could pull a Caltrans and fend off "remove Clearview now" for a period of time, in much the same way that agency fended off the exit tab requirement for 30 years.  But it doesn't make sense for the typical DOT to do this given that signs have to be replaced more frequently owing to the retroreflectivity requirement.  It made sense for Caltrans only because its sign hardware had excess durability, its sign replacement cycles were very infrequent after 1970, and retroreflectivity requirements at the time were much more relaxed.

[jakeroot]