The Worst of Road Signs

[roadfro]

Wyoming put in a new I-25 interchange south of Cheyenne with roundabouts at the new crossroad, and they rebuilt the Vandehei Exit 13 with roundabouts as well.  At each there are some not-so-good signs.   

This one, just looks wrong to me - the weight of the capital letters are too strong compared the lowercase. 
<removed image>
Then, when I took the time to drive the little roundabout, found this sign in it - they did it again with the Uppercase letters, but then why did they put "SOUTH" in Highway Gothic instead of the Clearview like the city names on the rest of the sign?

Not only are they using different stroke widths and letter sizes, the intercharacter spacing is off on both of those signs.

Is it just me, but is this sign like, totally useless? A few miles north at the Vandehei exit, I saw this sign up after they finished the new exit/roundabout.    It only labels two out of the five roundabout choices. (NB I-25 and NB/SB Hynds Blvd are what's missing)

Well, it's not totally useless, but pretty close. I'm guessing they wanted to save money on panel size...?


Seriously, I think Wyo DOT just sucks with signs in general...

[1995hoo]

Strikes me as odd that they'd specify the time zone on I-95. One of the roads crossing from Alabama, sure–that's where the time changes. But I-95 doesn't go anywhere close to the Central Time Zone.

At least they don't say "EST", which sounds more official but would be wrong for more than half of the year...

Yeah, that's a pet peeve of mine.

[Duke87]

Bellows Falls, VT does a decent job of signing a New Hampshire state route, but look at the treatment they give their own state.

[agentsteel53]

[awful green oval thing]
Bellows Falls, VT does a decent job of signing a New Hampshire state route, but look at the treatment they give their own state.

that's doubleplusungood, because it means that this gantry bit the dust:

[Duke87]

that's doubleplusungood, because it means that this gantry bit the dust:

Interestingly, though, the new gantry is not in the same spot as the old one. Here's where the old one was:


Both new and old are visible on street view. (but slide over onto the porkchop and the old one vanishes!)

[vtk]

I think the last two posts are misusing the word gantry.  A more correct term for a group of signs might be display, or assembly.  A signage display is often found on a gantry, as illustrated on the Wiktionary page, but that is not the case in the Vermont photos.

[1995hoo]

(e) The sign doesn't give any destinations. This is minor in a way because the signs for the specific ramps do list destinations, but I've always thought that a sign that merely gives a road's name isn't particularly helpful to someone who doesn't already know the area.

More than likely on the primary exit BGSs in urban areas, the use of street names usually takes precedence over specific destinations because the locals will tend to call that particular thoroughfare by it's street name rather than it's route number.  Usually one secondary exit BGSs will list a couple of destinations (cities, landmarks, etc...), referring drivers to USE EXIT xxx, for example. 

But once you get out in the rural areas, BGSs will list destinations on their primary exit signs because either the locals call the thoroughfare by the route number more often than the street name, or the thoroughfare is simply known as "Highway/Route xxx".

But as far as the other aesthetics of the sign go, It's not too bad. 

And why is there just as many "accepted" abbreviations for turnpike as there are "accepted" spellings for that Libyan dictator currently in hiding???  Can't we just settle on a single spelling and be done with it? 

(My vote goes for "Tpk.")   

Regarding the abbreviation for "Turnpike," I don't care what they use so much as I think they ought to strive for internal consistency such that they use the same abbreviation on all their signs.

But let me give you two local examples of signs that I think do a much more effective job than the sign shown above, although I'll readily concede that the signs for VA-236 don't have the same problem as the one on I-395 does of having to deal with two street names for the same road. These signs are on the Inner Loop of the Beltway. The first is just to the north of the Braddock Road interchange and is the first advance sign for the VA-236 interchange, and the second is the sign bridge just before VA-236 passes over the Beltway. (Both photos are video captures from my iPhone, which was clipped to the passenger-side sun visor. The second image is crooked because the phone shifted its position as I went over some bumps.) Quite frankly, I think these signs look immensely better than the ones on I-395 in just about every possible way, but what I haven't been able to find out is whether these signs were done by the VDOT sign shop or whether the private consortium that's rebuilding the Beltway was responsible for producing the signs. On the US-50 sign I would have listed Arlington above Fairfax, however, because the ramp towards Arlington comes up first when you exit there.

(I also think the way the street name is used on the VA-236 signs here, in smaller type next to the route number, makes more sense than the MUTCD's preference of omitting it, but since I've seen Virginia's signs in this style since 1974, it may just be what I'm used to seeing. Funny thing is, BTW, I don't know anyone who says "Little River Turnpike"–I always hear it called "236," although back when I was a Boy Scout one of our adult leaders called it "Lert," as in "LRT" pronounced as a word.)

[codyg1985]

I didn't get a picture, but Georgia's 511 signs use what looks like Helvetica.

[Ian]

Not related, but that rollover sign in that second photo above looks odd. Is this a new VDOT sign?

[1995hoo]

Not related, but that rollover sign in that second photo above looks odd. Is this a new VDOT sign?

First time I've ever seen it (and I use that ramp frequently when I go to visit my parents in Fairfax). Signs I've seen there in the past had a black tanker pictured.

[roadfro]

Not related, but that rollover sign in that second photo above looks odd. Is this a new VDOT sign?

First time I've ever seen it (and I use that ramp frequently when I go to visit my parents in Fairfax). Signs I've seen there in the past had a black tanker pictured.

Seems like they're using an outline of a tanker instead of the standard truck symbol. Is there something about that ramp that affects tanker trucks but not other types of trucks?

[1995hoo]

Not related, but that rollover sign in that second photo above looks odd. Is this a new VDOT sign?

First time I've ever seen it (and I use that ramp frequently when I go to visit my parents in Fairfax). Signs I've seen there in the past had a black tanker pictured.

Seems like they're using an outline of a tanker instead of the standard truck symbol. Is there something about that ramp that affects tanker trucks but not other types of trucks?

I don't know about that particular loop-around ramp, but its corresponding ramp that merges into the foreground of that picture has seen a disproportionate number of tanker accidents over the years, including one where a truck went up in flames. Perhaps they're being overly cautious, although the exit ramp to which that sign applies has a noticeably sharper curve to it than it used to have because the C/D lane has been shifted roughly two lanes' worth to the right of where it used to be (it used to be to the left of the first jersey wall to the left in that picture; the C/D lane is new) and because the westbound 236 overpass has been moved slightly to the north of where the old one was prior to the reconstruction.

(The construction project involves widening the Beltway by four lanes total, two on each side, and then converting the two left lanes on each side into HOT lanes. So all the interchanges had to be reconstructed because the overpasses couldn't accommodate the wider Beltway.)

[hbelkins]

Seems like they're using an outline of a tanker instead of the standard truck symbol. Is there something about that ramp that affects tanker trucks but not other types of trucks?

I would guess that tankers are much more susceptible to shifting loads than other vehicles, especially if the tanker is not full.

[Ian]

Some from this past May. How NOT to do Clearview:

[WillWeaverRVA]

VDOT's been guilty of that too:

[Brian556]

Corinth, TX

[Central Avenue]

Really now? Someone can place the arrows wrong even when they're hand-making them from tape?

[agentsteel53]

VDOT's been guilty of that too:

[Extra Tall Caps]

those appear to have a 3:5 height of lowercase glyph to uppercase glyph, as opposed to the modern standard of 2:3.

this would, generally, not be a problem.  one of the first mixed-case alphabets to be published after extensive study (California, 1950) specified that height ratio.  However, they made the stroke width on the lowercase letters (Series EM) correctly proportional so that the strokes would be constant width. 

with the Clearview here, the stroke width is far too small for the lowercase letters because it was an unthinking resize.

[1995hoo]

VDOT's been guilty of that too:

[images omitted]

We have some like that here near the Pentagon and I think the ones here look even worse because they contain multiple words. To my eye, when there are multiple words with the larger initial uppercase letter it makes you focus on the initial caps rather than on the wording as a whole. The third picture perhaps exemplifies it best: My eye notices the "WFC" on the left-hand sign, the "SSS" on the middle sign, and the "FM" on the right-hand sign. On the Spotsylvania and Thornburg signs WillWeaverRVA posted, I find it less distracting–though still quite ugly, to be sure!–and I think it's probably because there's only the one word, so there's nothing else to compete for attention.

[thenetwork]

Some from this past May. How NOT to do Clearview:

Compared to the first pic, that overhead assembly in the 2nd picture doesn't look that bad at all. 

Back to the first pic:  I know Old Steubenville Pike is a l-o-n-g header, but ya' could'a put all the 376 info on 1 line a-piece!  Just sayin'.

[jdb1234]

[kharvey10]

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=edwardsville,il&ll=38.79632,-89.905002&spn=0.000419,0.00066&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&gl=us&t=h&z=21&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=38.79632,-89.905002&panoid=akxqe9W-9PwofMN1ZDWiBw&cbp=12,201.62,,0,0

In Edwardsville, IL on IL 143 just west of 55 there are some piss-poor IL 143 shields out there.  Street view doesn't show the best version but my main camera battery was dead and I did not feel like pulling out my cell phone camera for it.

[roadfro]

Some from this past May. How NOT to do Clearview:

I know Old Steubenville Pike is a l-o-n-g header, but ya' could'a put all the 376 info on 1 line a-piece!  Just sayin'.

On interchange sequence signs such as this one, the destination city is not really necessary and not normally included for the interstates (although I can see that there was plenty of room to do so in this case). That would have eliminated the perceived need for the horizontal lines between each interchange name/distance.

Given the 1-mile distance to a major Interstate junction, the sign probably should've been designed as separate overhead signs instead of an interchange sequence sign...

[Anonymity Lane]

That looks like off-brand Gotham to me.

[bigboi00069]

Here is what i can think to post.


North Miami Beach Blvd is 163rd in some areas and 167th in others. They put the 167th sign where it is 163rd then poorly covered up the 7 with that 3 sticker


Here the I-95 shield is wide when it should be narrow, the US 441 shield is narrow when it should be wide and something about the FL 826 sign seems wrong too.


This is just wrong. The 95 is way too big.

There are a few more i can think of that ive seen but i dont currently have any pictures. Once i get some i will post...