What future will road signs have?

[papaT10932]

With the increased accessibility and use of GPS technology, what do you think is in store for road signs? Will it ever come to a point where signs will become totally obsolete? 

[Michael in Philly]

I don't have a GPS and have no interest in it....

[SP Cook]

Road signs will never be obsolete.  Aside from legal issues, GPS's current best function is to get you lost.

I can see a time where there is far more "real time" information, both in GPS and on signage, which would be more like the "scoreboard" type deals.  Knowing, for example, that there is a crash five miles down the road, can save a life.

[corco]

I'd say the super sci-fi version that we probably won't see in our lifetimes is a deal where all automobiles send their location to a satellite, and that relays back relevant information that's portrayed on a HUD within the car, doing away with road signs.

Or beyond that, your car knows where you're going and car drives you, rendering signs useless (if I'm not dead by the time that becomes mainstream, even if it happens next year for some reason, I'll kill myself. Life will have ceased to be fun anymore. No joke.)

In the near future, I'd say signs will just be more dynamic like SP Cook said, and relay live information about crashes and delays, possibly automatically suggesting detour routes.

As much as it sucks, I'm quite certain we're at most 20 years off from GPSes being standard, really-hard-to-deactivate equipment in cars that will be A) much more reliable than it is now and B) tell us what route to take whether we like it or not.

[Duke87]

It is not entirely implausable that at some point in the distant future GPS devices will be able to know not just what road you have to be on but what lane you have to be in, update in real time to account for accidents and construction, and perhaps even be able to even automatically drive the car.
And that is all well and good... until the device breaks. Or until your car breaks down. Or until you get into an accident. Then you have a stranded motorist who has no idea where he is.

Also consider that not only motorists use street signs. Pedestrians need to find where they're going, too. True, your smartphone may know where you are, but it too can break (or just die, because you forgot to charge it). And there are places where you don't want to be flashing one of those things lest you get mugged.

There is also a national security vulnerability here. If a GPS network is the only way to navigate, then all an invading army (or a hacker) needs to do is knock the network out of commission and everything grinds to a halt.

[cjk374]

There is also a national security vulnerability here. If a GPS network is the only way to navigate, then all an invading army (or a hacker) needs to do is knock the network out of commission and everything grinds to a halt.

....or a meteor or space junk destroys the satellite and THEN watch the beautiful disaster unfold!  People will be blasted back into the dark-ages (a.k.a. simpler times)!!!  

[realjd]

I can't see road signs ever going away. Even if automatically driving cars become available commercially (which will happen), the transportation system sill needs to be backwards compatible with existing vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians.

I think a more realistic future will be incremental improvements. I expect to see dynamic signs look more like regular signs as screen technology improves, perhaps even getting to the point where most BGS signs are dynamic/reprogrammable (at least in urban areas). I also wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of electronic beacon technology build into signs to aid in communicating to in-car displays, navigation systems, etc. This would be particularly useful for construction and incident management uses.

[vdeane]

Even with GPS, you still need signs to tell you where the turn your GPS is telling you about is.

[Scott5114]

I doubt that we'll ever have "reprogrammable" signs be so commonplace as to replace permanent signage. It will always be cheaper to put up a reflectorized sign than a giant LCD panel or whatever that can be easily changed. Most signs do not need to be changed ever throughout the course of their lifetime, certainly not often enough to warrant the expense to keep these signs powered and undamaged. (And if a blackout happens, you don't want every road sign going dark...) I could see them being used in construction sites, however, since it would be more useful there for the contractor to own a set of reprogrammable signs that could serve many roles across hundreds of different project sites. I would expect the MUTCD to require they be connected to an off-the-grid power source to limit the impact of blackouts or power surges.

I think the future of signs will be more towards better and cheaper technology for reflectorization, more studies on improving the legibility of fonts (I could forsee a Clearview II on down the road; an even more legible font that obsoletes Clearview), and further refinement and improvement on markings and symbols that "speak" to motorists even more than the current symbols. I doubt we will see large scale upheaval but rather more incremental, bit-by-bit evolution much like we have seen since at least 1948.

Watch me eat all my words in 2021.

What would be terrifically cool, if unlikely, would be if hologram technology like they have on Star Trek ever happened. You could attach holoemitters to each delineator and hook them all to a traffic control office like many states and cities have already. If an incident happened, signs and cones just appear out of midair to route traffic around the incident. When the incident is cleared, they disappear just as quickly. No lag required for a human to show up and deploy, just a touch of a button at the central office.

[xcellntbuy]

I don't have a GPS and have no interest in it....

Same here.  I also have no cellphone.  No need for either.

[agentsteel53]

I personally have no land line.

[hm insulators]

I don't have a GPS and have no interest in it....

Same here.  I also have no cellphone.  No need for either.

That makes three of us; I have neither cell phone nor GPS and don't want either one.

I don't see a wholesale movement toward "active" LED road signs. Aside from the electricity they would consume (which costs money cash-strapped cities and stsates can't afford), the lit-up signs would only add to the growing problem of light pollution.

[realjd]

I never said LED, or even an active display technology. I'm picturing something more like an e-ink type display that holds its image without power consumption. The way those technologies are developing, they should be inexpensive enough to use in large quantities if there's a need in the future. And I think they would be used more in urban areas for smart traffic management and indecent management type uses.  I also don't see every sign being reprogrammable.

I like the holographic cones idea. Very cool concept. It could be extended to holographic stop lights replacing construction flaggers or police directing traffic.

[Hot Rod Hootenanny]

I personally have no land line.

Funny. We lost our land line to a lightning strike last year. It was cheaper (though a major hassle) to switch to cell phone than to repair the land line.
P.S. We were fortunate. Our neighbors ended up taking the brunt of the lightning and had to replace many of their appliances and TV. We just lost our phone.

[Scott5114]

The issue with using technology similar to e-ink would be the difficulty in making it retroreflective. I mean, I suppose that each individual little "droplet" in the e-ink could be half retroreflective white and half green (or whatever color) but applying a paint studded with glass beads to plastic beads seems like it might be a bit difficult to pull off.

I think if VMS's do become more advanced it will be in the direction of smaller LED pixels in multiple colors. Each of the machines at my workplace has a small status indicator made of 1mm square elements which contain two tiny LEDs, red and green. If both are on it creates an orange color. If the cost on those came down I could see them being used to create high-resolution VMSes in three colors, suitable for displaying maps and symbols. Actually, now that I think of it, doesn't Europe have comparably high-res, RGB VMSes already?

Of course if the holographic thing I was talking about ever happened, VMSes would be obsolete. You could simply have a sign appear displaying what you needed it to, and then when the message is no longer relevant, it just goes away.

[mgk920]

As I always tell everyone who I talk to on the subject - you must remember that the internal maps in those modern GPS receivers are only as good as the college interns who went out and did the mapping.



Mike

[realjd]

Apparently the company Daktronics (of sports scoreboard fame) is already working on products like this. They're the ones who do the black-on-white variable speed limit signs in Orlando:


And some toll booth signs in Fort Lauderdale:


They also make many of those obnoxiously bright digital billboards.

As for the retroreflectivity of my hypothetical e-ink signs, why not just externally light them? They do that often enough here in Florida anyway, usually with solar panels providing power.