Mandated Sign Reflectivity Standards

[wandering drive]

I heard recently from a city employee here in MN that every city has been mandated to inventory all of their signs and replace or re-sheet them if they don't meet reflectivity standards by 2012.  I asked him if this was true at the county and state level and he presumed that they would be doing the same.  Say it ain't so!  I understand the liability concerns if someone, say, can't see a stop sign and gets in an accident, but I don't want the classic signs replaced, or am I just panicking over nothing?

[J N Winkler]

"Required" in this case probably means just that that particular city has chosen to comply by compiling a sign condition inventory.  What the MUTCD has now is a retroreflectivity performance standard and IIRC, there are multiple routes to compliance--agencies can replace signs at set intervals, compile sign inventories with condition details and quite often photographs of the actual signs, test sign reflectivity using measuring equipment, or some combination of all of the above.

It is hard to say what implications this will have for old signs.  My reading of the MUTCD is that a sign retroreflectivity policy, consistently applied nationwide on a money-is-no-object basis, equates to a holocaust of old signs.  However, the MUTCD does not and is not intended to override state law.  Moreover, states and localities differ considerably in (1) the amounts of funding they have available, (2) the way they program expenditures, and (3) the extent to which they have vestiges of sovereign immunity left in their legal systems.  My guess is that a fair few old guide signs will be left alone, particularly in poorer jurisdictions.

[froggie]

Given that this is Minnesota, who arguably got the ball rolling on a National MUTCD to begin with (and has been very proactive on uniform standards regardless of route type or maintenance jurisdiction), I'd say it's some sort of pre-emptive move on MnDOT's part, at least with regard to the state aid routes.

[Scott5114]

On a practical standpoint, I doubt that all old signs will disappear entirely. Remember the sorts of places a lot of old signs appear: on back roads in small towns, on old alignments, and on side roads near their junction with a highway. These are the sorts of places signs tend to be posted and "forgotten about", thus why they're yet to be replaced. So if they're been forgotten about for this long...it seems doubtful the fraggin' wagon even knows they're there, or will find out about them by any other means other than randomly stumbling upon them (and since they'd not have a suitable sign for replacing it with them, they'd have to turn in a report to the bureaucracy at the home office, which is work, so they're disinclined to do that–and even if they did, chances are there for the bureaucracy to "forget" about it by losing the report...). So I doubt that you have much to worry about.

Look at it like this: they mandated green guide signs in 1961, but we still see white ones standing every once in a great while 50 years later, don't we?

[agentsteel53]

they mandated green guide signs in 1961, but we still see white ones standing every once in a great while 50 years later, don't we?

not quite.  '57 was the mandate of green signs for interstates.  then '78 was the mandate for ALL roads, to pick a single constant color as opposed to each state doing its own thing for various classifications.  For example, Florida had all freeway signs green and surface streets white, while New York had white for non-interstate freeways as well as surface streets.

by '78 many states had moved to all greens (Florida, for example, changed over sometime around 1972 - California, by 1959 to no whites, and 1962 for no more blacks) but I know for example Kentucky was putting up whites as late as 1978 and North Carolina is still doing it!