Weird KS signage (ping Mr Winkler)

[Scott5114]

There are few signs scattered about Kansas that have normal sized capital letters and tiny lowercase letters, like this.

Most of these signs look odd in other ways too (bad alignment, odd placement of greenspace, wonky fonts on shields). I know of a sign for the K-32 exit from I-635 that is like this one, and I've seen pictures of one in Wichita too.

What causes this? A newbie sign maker at KDOT? Excess inventory of little letters that need to be disposed of? The crew ran out of big letters? What's the deal?

[J N Winkler]

In Kansas' case these signs are invariably isolated, which makes me suspect that they are hastily assembled knock-down replacements.  (I don't know if any KDOT garages keep demountable copy on hand, but in any case KDOT has now abandoned it in favor of direct-applied copy for new construction.)  Mistakes of the kind you describe can be seen not just on large guide signs, but also on route marker signs.  The first I-235 route marker you see going north as you enter at Zoo Boulevard has Helvetica-ish digits, for example.

It is actually a fairly common error to mix 16" and 12" lettering in construction plans, but this has never happened with any KDOT construction plans I have seen.  (I have everything KDOT has uploaded since day one of online E-plans, which was March 2008, and I also have some old signing plans going back to 1999.)  KDOT really does have quite good quality control where signing plans and contract sign fabrication are concerned.

In other states the 16"/12" mixing error is common and seems to have become more so since the 2004 edition of Standard Highway Signs came out.  The 2004 edition differs from the previous (1979) edition in that the chapter dealing with sign designs now no longer has a dimensioned drawing of an ordinary advance guide sign.  This drawing makes it clear that the 16" uppercase/12" lowercase specification refers to a single type size which has uppercase letters that are 16" high, the 12" element referring to the loop height of the lowercase letters (which is always three-quarters of the capital letter height for Series E Modified).  In the absence of this drawing as a natural corrective, I suspect a lot of inexperienced sign designers think that they need to change the type size after every capital letter (which is not the case) in order to comply with the letter size specifications tabulated in MUTCD Chapter 2E.

This mistake is still common even in states which now use Clearview as their default font for mixed-case legend on guide signs.  However, with Clearview it is less glaring because the difference between uppercase height and lowercase loop height is much less for Clearview than it is for Series E Modified.

[Scott5114]

Hmm, that sounds like a good theory. Although it does still make me wonder how the K-32 sign happened, as it is on a gantry and first appeared after the Santa Fe railyard bridge was reconstructed.

I'm glad that KDOT has such good QC! I wish that KDOT was my DOT...Oklahoma has so many ugly signs...

[J N Winkler]

I'm glad that KDOT has such good QC! I wish that KDOT was my DOT...Oklahoma has so many ugly signs...

I don't think I have ever lived in a place where I wholeheartedly approved of the DOT (or equivalent transportation agency).  I am a native Kansan, but I was born and raised in Wichita, which might almost have been cut out of Kansas where KDOT is concerned.  The biggest road construction projects in Wichita when I was growing up were the expansion of Kellogg Avenue to a full freeway and the building of the K-96 Northeast Freeway, both of which were locally managed projects with very little KDOT funding or involvement.  In the case of Kellogg, KDOT built the West Street SPUI (first in Kansas), railroad viaduct replacement, and I-135/US 54 turban, but that was about it; everything else was paid for partially with a sales tax increment and supervised by the City of Wichita public works department.  The Northeast Freeway was a joint city-county project as well.

You really have to go to northeastern Kansas (Johnson County in particular) to find a part of the state where KDOT is indisputably the number-one provider of new capacity on urban principal arterials.  There is a tendency in Wichita to feel that NE Kansas in general gets more than its fair share of state funding for transportation, partly because it is predominantly Republican in a Republican state (and has a marked country-club ambience because of all the corporate headquarters in Overland Park) while the mainstay of the Wichita economy is light manufacturing, which implies a unionized working class (Reagan Democrats).

In theory state funding is allocated according to strict formula-based criteria and there is no scope for regional favoritism.  In reality, because the Johnson County suburbs are part of the Kansas City metropolitan area, they consistently score higher in terms of need (since capacity demand in large metropolitan areas grows faster than population and land area coverage) and receive more per capita than Wichita.  Moreover, Wichita's own capacity improvements have had to be largely locally funded, through a sales tax increment for Kellogg construction and also (I think) K-96.  I am not aware that any of the Johnson County suburbs have had to pick up this burden.

To put it simply, Wichita is the square peg in the round hole.  The Johnson County folks have the state looking after their back, and the rural counties out west get a few projects thrown them every now and then (not too many because one-person-one-vote keeps the price down), while Wichita is sort of ignored.

[Scott5114]

Hmmm, that's an interesting point. Most of my Kansas experience has been in NE Kansas (I have relatives in both Johnson and Wyandotte Counties) though when I lived in Springfield I would occasionally cut through SE Kansas on my way home to OK and everything seemed fine there too. I do wish I had more experience with the Wichita area, though what I've seen of I-135 and I-235 didn't really look that bad, and the entire length I-135 seemed fairly decent when I clinched it back in 2002 or so.

I would imagine that Wichita is in the same boat in KS as Tulsa is in OK. I like to joke with Jeremy that the ODOT budget allocates twelve dollars to district eight...

[route56]

FYI, I can confirm that the sign that Scott posted is no more. It was removed as part of the big signage project and not replaced.