The Clearview thread

[PHLBOS]

What really turned me off on Clearview was that some states were so eager to switch out BGSs which were only a few years old with new Clearview signs, while there are other BGSs which are well over 15-20 years old that are still standing.

<Church Lady Mode ON> Well, I wonder what state I could be speaking of...I don't know, could it be, ummmmm.....OHIO??? </Church Lady>

Michigan was a lot worse than Ohio for replacing perfectly good signs with Clearview signs just because.

Add Pennsylvania to the list as well.  They were one of the first states to offer & adopt such.

During a recent sign replacement job along US 202/322 near West Chester; PennDOT even went as far as transferring an existing BGS onto a new gantry but mask the Gothic Exton control city with one in Clearview.  Exhibit A.  The approach BGS' for this exit got a similar treatment.

Bold emphasis added to below-quote:

Hooray!

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

The statements in the FHWA reasoning for yanking Clearview are not a surprise.  It has seemed that a lot of places have had sign layout quality go way downhill at the same time they introduced Clearview, which is probably not a coincidence.  I like how they basically called out the offenders who either would not or could not read the explicit limits on Clearview usage and used it all over the place.  Those offenders probably are what really caused it to fail in the end.  Had Clearview only ever been used as approved, it might have survived.

^^This.  The varied implementation of Clearview was indeed user-error.  While some newer PennDOT & PTC installations, to their credit, got better at it (in terms of proper use of Clearview per FHWA Guidelines); such was too little too late.

[Scott5114]

Since the FHWA insisted on going back to Series Gothic they really ought to take the existing type design, clean it up a bit (because some of the characters are really clunky) and expand it into a range that is more acceptable for modern type use.

If they have to stick with the existing Series Gothic design the FHWA just needs to expand it. The character set is puny even by freebie font standards. Actually there are some open source typefaces that have huge character sets. Check out a newly released typeface, Tehuti at Font Squirrel. It's not appropriate for traffic sign use, but it has an exhaustive character set. Over 4300 glyphs per font weight.
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/tehuti

Series Gothic doesn't have to be expanded to those extremes. But it does need to satisfy a check list of modern typeface requirements, otherwise it's only going to be good for use in the United States writing out only American sounding terms and not even being properly functional for that.

The reason for this, of course, is because FHWA Series is a public-domain typeface that has existed since the 1950s as a series of mathematically-plotted definitions in the MUTCD/SHS books. FHWA didn't develop any diacritics because the MUTCD requires leaving them off, so what would be point in specifying them?

Commercial type foundries include all of the characters they can in order to sell more copies of fonts; they don't want to lose out on a sale because their font didn't support some special character the customer needed. But the people who would buy a copy of FHWA Series are people who intend to use it on a road sign, which isn't supposed to be using anything but unaccented letters anyway. Where's the financial incentive?

If you really want FHWA Series to have diacritics, ask sammi if it's OK for you to add them to the Roadgeek 2014 font. But I think what you really want is Interstate.

[seicer]

Hooray!

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

The statements in the FHWA reasoning for yanking Clearview are not a surprise.  It has seemed that a lot of places have had sign layout quality go way downhill at the same time they introduced Clearview, which is probably not a coincidence.  I like how they basically called out the offenders who either would not or could not read the explicit limits on Clearview usage and used it all over the place.  Those offenders probably are what really caused it to fail in the end.  Had Clearview only ever been used as approved, it might have survived.

Kudos to INDOT and MassDOT, agencies of two states I have a relationship with, for never jumping on the bandwagon. 

InDOT has Clearview in southern Indiana along Interstate 65 at the new Lincoln/Kennedy bridges.

[tdindy88]

I believe that bridge project is done by a separate group (the same doing the East End Bridge.) That, and Kentucky is supposed to be in charge of the downtown bridge with Indiana in charge of the East End. Either way, it shouldn't be technically viewed as an INDOT project. The state to my knowledge has never gone full in to using Clearview, all new highway projects have used the same font as always.

For the record though, and I don't know why, I've always found Michigan Clearview signs to be some of the better looking ones, compared to other surrounding states. It may just be me though. And I'm not talking about those interstate shields with the Clearview numbers in them.

[Brandon]

I always felt, even back in the mtr days, that Clearview was being pushed very hard by its creators when no such real need for a new font existed.  The comparisons I always saw showing FHWA versus Clearview always had slightly taller Clearview letters (I'd say they were bigger) on newer reflective sheeting next to an older FHWA sign on older reflective sheeting.  Then the claim was about how much better Clearview was to see.  Well, of course it's easier to see, it's on the newer reflective sheeting with bigger letters.  Match them up one to one, then compare.  Use the same height letters and the same reflective sheeting.  Any apparent advantages of Clearview disappear as they're due to the sheeting and size, not any inherent properties of the font.

Don't get me wrong, Clearview isn't a bad font, it's still ugly, IMHO, and almost as ugly as Transport (which I disdain), but not as bad for roads as Arial or Helvetica.  But don't give the new font all the advantages when making a comparison.  That is unfair advertising and smacks of a bad infomercial.

[PurdueBill]

I always felt, even back in the mtr days, that Clearview was being pushed very hard by its creators when no such real need for a new font existed.  The comparisons I always saw showing FHWA versus Clearview always had slightly taller Clearview letters (I'd say they were bigger) on newer reflective sheeting next to an older FHWA sign on older reflective sheeting.  Then the claim was about how much better Clearview was to see.  Well, of course it's easier to see, it's on the newer reflective sheeting with bigger letters.  Match them up one to one, then compare.  Use the same height letters and the same reflective sheeting.  Any apparent advantages of Clearview disappear as they're due to the sheeting and size, not any inherent properties of the font.

Don't get me wrong, Clearview isn't a bad font, it's still ugly, IMHO, and almost as ugly as Transport (which I disdain), but not as bad for roads as Arial or Helvetica.  But don't give the new font all the advantages when making a comparison.  That is unfair advertising and smacks of a bad infomercial.

All this!!!  Clearview's "advantages" were largely due to taller/larger letters and different reflectivity.  Even a middle school science fair project does a better job holding all the other variables constant while changing just one thing.

As far as the Ohio River bridges, I knew of that Clearview but that was a bi-state operation as I recall it, with Kentucky seeming to be in the driver's seat, and I would bet Kentucky's taste in font prevailed due to that.  Similar has happened at OH 8 and the Turnpike where the large project on OH 8 was an ODOT project which left some Clearview signs on Turnpike property, the only Turnpike vestige being the sign lighting they probably insisted on.  When two agencies have to collaborate, interesting things happen.  (Clearview has shown up on a couple gore signs on the Turnpike as well, but that may be thanks to contractors doing Ohio signage getting used to using Clearview.)

[Rothman]

I thought the visibility advantage was also attributed to the serifs?

[machias]

Perhaps if engineers and other designers stopped treating GuidSIGN and SignCAD as glorified word processors and actually designed the signs to spec perhaps Clearview would have stood a chance. While the misuse of Clearview has certainly had a large contribution to the degradation of the quality of signs on our roadways, automation in general plays a bigger part of that. "Eh, the computer did it, close enough."

[jakeroot]

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

They weren't sold a dud. They were sold an experiment. There was no expectation, no requirement, to use Clearview. The agencies that paid for their licence were fully aware of what they were buying into. The experiment failed, and that's that. Sucks to be them, I guess.

[PurdueBill]

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

They weren't sold a dud. They were sold an experiment. There was no expectation, no requirement, to use Clearview. The agencies that paid for their licence were fully aware of what they were buying into. The experiment failed, and that's that. Sucks to be them, I guess.

The Clearview marketing was quite slick in not saying it was an experiment in progress but was a finished product that improved legibility.  As shown on their ordering page, they showed Clearview in dark-on-light applications that were never approved in any interim approval, just inviting users to deploy it inappropriately.  5-W was the only series that should have been in the wild but they were happy to sell all the series and let users deploy them.  Seems like they were selling stuff they knew wasn't fully vetted or tested along with 5-W.

[jakeroot]

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

They weren't sold a dud. They were sold an experiment. There was no expectation, no requirement, to use Clearview. The agencies that paid for their licence were fully aware of what they were buying into. The experiment failed, and that's that. Sucks to be them, I guess.

The Clearview marketing was quite slick in not saying it was an experiment in progress but was a finished product that improved legibility.  As shown on their ordering page, they showed Clearview in dark-on-light applications that were never approved in any interim approval, just inviting users to deploy it inappropriately.  5-W was the only series that should have been in the wild but they were happy to sell all the series and let users deploy them.  Seems like they were selling stuff they knew wasn't fully vetted or tested along with 5-W.

First off, the initial studies to come out (AFAIK) showed Clearview to have better legibility than the comparable FHWA font, so it should be no surprise that their website promotes the typeface as a one-size-fits-all replacement for Highway Gothic. Second, their examples are not wrong everywhere. Only the US denies negative-contrast use. Western Canada has been using Clearview for some time now, in both negative and positive contrast (my point is that the US is not Clearview's only customer). Third, the agencies that purchased Clearview licences should not be looking to the people who developed it for guidance, but rather the agency that permitted their use to begin with, if only because the interim approval came with massive caveats anyways.

[roadman]

Question - Has there been any other example of an interim approval being recinded where the practice allowed by said interim approval was not incorporated into the MUTCD?

[J N Winkler]

I always felt, even back in the mtr days, that Clearview was being pushed very hard by its creators when no such real need for a new font existed.  The comparisons I always saw showing FHWA versus Clearview always had slightly taller Clearview letters (I'd say they were bigger) on newer reflective sheeting next to an older FHWA sign on older reflective sheeting.  Then the claim was about how much better Clearview was to see.  Well, of course it's easier to see, it's on the newer reflective sheeting with bigger letters.  Match them up one to one, then compare.  Use the same height letters and the same reflective sheeting.  Any apparent advantages of Clearview disappear as they're due to the sheeting and size, not any inherent properties of the font.

All this!!!  Clearview's "advantages" were largely due to taller/larger letters and different reflectivity.  Even a middle school science fair project does a better job holding all the other variables constant while changing just one thing.

Clearview's creators encouraged agencies to think they would reach a nirvana of sign legibility if they used Clearview and upgraded to better retroreflective sheetings, but the actual Clearview research by TTI and others did try to control for sheeting type.  It was pretty consistently found that the tested versions of Clearview had a unit legibility advantage over Series E Modified that strengthened with age of the test subjects and ASTM classification of the sheeting.

This might have been attributable solely to the use of a higher lowercase loop height rather than (as claimed) opened counters and the variations in stroke width that come with humanistic design, but I would not count this against Clearview because it was meant to be a clean-sheet design from the start, while the design of Series E Modified has been fixed since 1958 at least and attempts to modify it for greater legibility would have been subject to the same pipe-and-slippers objections as Clearview.

The goal of the research was to come up with a typeface family that would offer greater legibility within existing design parameters; it was never to hobble the candidate typeface for the sake of ensuring it didn't have some kind of advantage over Series E Modified that traditionalists might think unfair.  Once the basic visual concept of Clearview was established in the course of the initial PTI studies (borrowing the humanistic aspects of the Transport typefaces), hunting for intrinsic features of typefaces that control unit legibility independently of sheeting type, proportions of lowercase letters with regard to capital letters, etc. fell to a separate (and quite complex) line of research pursued by others.  There is even a PhD dissertation out there (I forget author and title, but I think I have a downloaded copy somewhere) that runs to more than 400 pages on intrinsic legibility factors.

My own problem with the early Clearview research by PTI and TTI has more to do with how it was reported.  Clearview evolved as it was studied; initially it had the same 4:3 uppercase/lowercase loop height ratio as the FHWA series, and the proportions of the lowercase letters were increased only relatively late in the process.  Stroke width was also manipulated, allegedly for reasons of aesthetics rather than legibility (there was an indicated preference for blocky, relatively bold presentation similar to Series E Modified).  The research reports should have included full glyph drawings and a more precise characterization of features such as stroke width, relative proportion of lowercase and capital letters, etc. so that others could determine accurately to which version of Clearview the results pertained.  This failure to be highly specific about the technical characteristics of typefaces tested is a weakness endemic to sign lettering legibility research from the 1930's onward.  D.W. Loutzenheiser's 1943 paper on experimental signs for the Pentagon road network (which used early versions of what eventually, in 1948, became the modern uppercase FHWA alphabet series) did include glyph drawings, and from these it is evident that there were significant differences between the 1943 experimental typefaces and the ones eventually published in 1948.  However, none of the later landmark sign legibility papers (Forbes & Moskowitz on mixed-case lettering in 1950, Solomon on night visibility in circa 1958, the early British studies into Series E Modified as a motorway signing typeface, the PTI and TTI Clearview studies, etc.) has had this level of specificity.

It seems to me that those who say it was wrong to experiment with typefaces in hopes of building a better mousetrap have either forgotten, or simply never knew, how preoccupied the traffic engineering profession was with the looming problem of the older driver in the early noughties.  The immediate motivation for the original PTI Clearview research was a study (by McGee, I think) which suggested that it might be necessary to go up from 16" UC to 20" UC for overhead signs on freeways partly for this reason.  Clearview, with a headline 11% unit legibility advantage over Series E Modified out of the same sign panel area, was one response to this challenge; another was Georgia DOT's flirtation with what it called "D Georgia," essentially a mixed-case version of Series D (glyphs never published and probably vendor-developed) intended to be used at 20" UC/15" LC in lieu of 16" UC/12" LC Series E Modified with some change in sign proportions but approximately the same overall area per panel.  Now Georgia DOT has given up and is spending more (including on new structures) for 20" UC/15" LC Series E Modified and a straight-up, no-nonsense 25% gain in reading distance.

It is also important not to forget that a huge part of the motivation for yanking the Clearview IA is the use of the condensed Clearview alphabets on conventional roads.  These were never tested as thoroughly as 5-W/5-W-R, which were positioned in 2004 as the Series E Modified analogues, and still don't have published test results that I am aware of.  And FHWA still has much to do in setting a floor for legibility.  It is my strong suspicion that creating the option to use mixed-case letters other than Series E Modified in the 2003 MUTCD, and then making the use of mixed-case (regardless of alphabet series) mandatory in the 2009 MUTCD, has holed that objective below the waterline.

[PurdueBill]

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

They weren't sold a dud. They were sold an experiment. There was no expectation, no requirement, to use Clearview. The agencies that paid for their licence were fully aware of what they were buying into. The experiment failed, and that's that. Sucks to be them, I guess.

The Clearview marketing was quite slick in not saying it was an experiment in progress but was a finished product that improved legibility.  As shown on their ordering page, they showed Clearview in dark-on-light applications that were never approved in any interim approval, just inviting users to deploy it inappropriately.  5-W was the only series that should have been in the wild but they were happy to sell all the series and let users deploy them.  Seems like they were selling stuff they knew wasn't fully vetted or tested along with 5-W.

First off, the initial studies to come out (AFAIK) showed Clearview to have better legibility than the comparable FHWA font, so it should be no surprise that their website promotes the typeface as a one-size-fits-all replacement for Highway Gothic. Second, their examples are not wrong everywhere. Only the US denies negative-contrast use. Western Canada has been using Clearview for some time now, in both negative and positive contrast (my point is that the US is not Clearview's only customer). Third, the agencies that purchased Clearview licences should not be looking to the people who developed it for guidance, but rather the agency that permitted their use to begin with, if only because the interim approval came with massive caveats anyways.

FHWA's summary of the Clearview early research stated "The use of Clearview as an alternative to the Standard Alphabets is allowed only on positive-contrast (white legend on a green, blue, or brown background) guide signs, as this contrast orientation is the only one that has demonstrated an improvement in legibility distance to date for those legends composed of upper- and lower-case letters when using specific series of Clearview lettering. The use of Clearview in negative-contrast color orientations, such as on regulatory and warning signs, has been shown to decrease legibility distance when compared with the FHWA Standard Alphabet series."  If research showed benefits for negative-contrast situations, it was not in any of the early research nor did FHWA ever modify interim approvals to allow it.  FHWA's letters actually stated that negative contrast DECREASED legibility and stated outright that the font was for use in Mixed-Case positive contrast destination legend on guide signs only--not warning signs, ALL CAPS action messages/exit gore signs, street name blades, etc. etc. etc. where it is rampant in many places.  If Clearview is inferior in negative contrast, then the places using it that way are making a big, misinformed mistake, enabled by the Clearview vendor showing it off on their web site in the bad applications and selling the -B series fonts.  5-W and 5-W-R were the only appropriate ones all along.

[J N Winkler]

Clearview certainly has the advantage over Series Gothic in Quebec since it has diacritics for upper and lowercase characters.

The old MTQ approach of splicing Univers diacritics onto Series E Modified worked fine, however.

In Spain their highway signs do use diacritics for more uppercase characters than Ã'. Their typeface looks a lot like Series Gothic, but there are some subtle differences. As far as using a slightly altered macron for Ã' that practice might work okay until you get into a situation where the characters like Ũ and Ū come into play.

I don't think Spanish uses the macron for anything, even loanwords from Japanese (the main context in which macrons are likely to be seen in English text, other than IPA transcriptions, which are themselves a special case).  The likeliest conflict is with ã in Portuguese--the suffix -ção is the Portuguese equivalent of Spanish -ción and English -tion.  There are border towns and control city destinations in Portugal which it is logical to sign in Spain and preferred practice EU-wide these days is to use the endonym (e.g. in Austria, "Praha" rather than "Prag" or "Prague").  Plus Galician is similar to Portuguese and bilingual/local-language signing is the norm in parts of Spain where much of the population has a language other than Castilian Spanish as its mother tongue.

A final observation regarding Spanish typography:  the typeface you are talking about is called Autopista.  It was introduced in 1992 as a successor to Series E Modified, which the Spanish used directly (even to the extent of photocopying the glyph sheets from our Standard Alphabets pamphlet--I'm not sure how they did diacritics back then), but is now (as of a new set of direction signs regulations promulgated last year) deprecated.  Autopista has the bias-cut bar tilde.  The other modern Spanish traffic signing alphabet is called Carretera Convencional after its former normal sphere of use but is now supposed to be used on autopistas and autovías as well.  It is an adaptation of Transport Heavy with proportions changed to match the 4:3 UC/LC ratio of Series E Modified and Autopista, and it has a straight-cut (not bias-cut) bar tilde that cannot be distinguished from a macron in any meaningful sense.

[lordsutch]

...another was Georgia DOT's flirtation with what it called "D Georgia," essentially a mixed-case version of Series D (glyphs never published and probably vendor-developed) intended to be used at 20" UC/15" LC in lieu of 16" UC/12" LC Series E Modified with some change in sign proportions but approximately the same overall area per panel.  Now Georgia DOT has given up and is spending more (including on new structures) for 20" UC/15" LC Series E Modified and a straight-up, no-nonsense 25% gain in reading distance.

One horrible, unsanctioned experiment followed by another IMO, that leads to ridiculous-looking signage to this day (particularly when a GDOT crew patches some Series D over E(M) just for the hell of it or because they are using the original sign specs rather than whatever the vendor was told to change post-letting as part of the E(M) transition); major projects are still being let with the sign design sheets laid out using Georgia D with annotations of "use E(M)". And there are still contractors and GDOT sign shops routinely using Georgia D instead of FHWA mixed-case Series D, 13 years later.

If nothing else, since the death of button copy there's no good reason to for anyone to continue using E(M) rather than reverting to basic Series E, particularly at GDOT's outlandish type sizes.

[jakeroot]

If nothing else, since the death of button copy there's no good reason to for anyone to continue using E(M) rather than reverting to basic Series E, particularly at GDOT's outlandish type sizes.

I'm blown away that no one, other than I think NE2(?), myself, and you have brought this up. Series E(M) exists only for button copy. I swear someone did some studies which showed EE(M) to be the best typeface of all.

[thenetwork]

Question - Has there been any other example of an interim approval being recinded where the practice allowed by said interim approval was not incorporated into the MUTCD?

Possibly this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15399103@N00/3154192609

Ohio tried a new style of railroad crossbuck in the early 00s at unsignaled crossings.  They were later replaced by normal YIELD signs, and as of Fall of 2015, all crossings without signals or gates in Ohio must have a STOP sign below the crossbucks instead of a YIELD sign (or nothing at all).  The most recent law is Ohio's doing and may or may not be at the urging of the MUTCD.

[cl94]

Question - Has there been any other example of an interim approval being recinded where the practice allowed by said interim approval was not incorporated into the MUTCD?

Possibly this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15399103@N00/3154192609

Ohio tried a new style of railroad crossbuck in the early 00s at unsignaled crossings.  They were later replaced by normal YIELD signs, and as of Fall of 2015, all crossings without signals or gates in Ohio must have a STOP sign below the crossbucks instead of a YIELD sign (or nothing at all).  The most recent law is Ohio's doing and may or may not be at the urging of the MUTCD.

I could have sworn that the MUTCD allows yield signs, but I might be wrong

[freebrickproductions]

Question - Has there been any other example of an interim approval being recinded where the practice allowed by said interim approval was not incorporated into the MUTCD?

Possibly this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15399103@N00/3154192609

Ohio tried a new style of railroad crossbuck in the early 00s at unsignaled crossings.  They were later replaced by normal YIELD signs, and as of Fall of 2015, all crossings without signals or gates in Ohio must have a STOP sign below the crossbucks instead of a YIELD sign (or nothing at all).  The most recent law is Ohio's doing and may or may not be at the urging of the MUTCD.

I could have sworn that the MUTCD allows yield signs, but I might be wrong

I believe they do, but the number of daily trains the line gets, speed of traffic (on both the road and rail), and visibility probably have to be factored in.

[thenetwork]

Question - Has there been any other example of an interim approval being recinded where the practice allowed by said interim approval was not incorporated into the MUTCD?

Possibly this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15399103@N00/3154192609

Ohio tried a new style of railroad crossbuck in the early 00s at unsignaled crossings.  They were later replaced by normal YIELD signs, and as of Fall of 2015, all crossings without signals or gates in Ohio must have a STOP sign below the crossbucks instead of a YIELD sign (or nothing at all).  The most recent law is Ohio's doing and may or may not be at the urging of the MUTCD.

I could have sworn that the MUTCD allows yield signs, but I might be wrong

They do, I was speaking of the "Ohio" Crossbucks, like the one in the picture.  I have seen the use of a standard YIELD sign used in conjunction with standard crossbucks in many states, but the crossbucks alone are all that is needed at an unsignaled crossing.  YIELD or STOP signs are optional.

[cl94]

Question - Has there been any other example of an interim approval being recinded where the practice allowed by said interim approval was not incorporated into the MUTCD?

Possibly this:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/15399103@N00/3154192609

Ohio tried a new style of railroad crossbuck in the early 00s at unsignaled crossings.  They were later replaced by normal YIELD signs, and as of Fall of 2015, all crossings without signals or gates in Ohio must have a STOP sign below the crossbucks instead of a YIELD sign (or nothing at all).  The most recent law is Ohio's doing and may or may not be at the urging of the MUTCD.

I could have sworn that the MUTCD allows yield signs, but I might be wrong

They do, I was speaking of the "Ohio" Crossbucks, like the one in the picture.  I have seen the use of a standard YIELD sign used in conjunction with standard crossbucks in many states, but the crossbucks alone are all that is needed at an unsignaled crossing.  YIELD or STOP signs are optional.

I know what you were referring to, but I found the stop sign requirement to be odd

[hbelkins]

I wonder if agencies who bought the license for Clearview, especially recently, might be looking for their money back because they were sold a dud. 

They weren't sold a dud. They were sold an experiment. There was no expectation, no requirement, to use Clearview. The agencies that paid for their licence were fully aware of what they were buying into. The experiment failed, and that's that. Sucks to be them, I guess.

I've never known Kentucky to install a Clearview sign. All the Clearview I've seen has been done by contractors. So I doubt seriously if the state ever bought a license for the font.

Now VDOT, on the other hand...

[Bobby5280]

Regarding Font Bureau's Interstate type family, it is a much better looking typeface than Series Gothic. Unfortunately it is not interchangeable with Series Gothic. Interstate has a lot more weights, from Hairline to Ultra Black. It just doesn't have the necessary widths to cover Series A, B, C, D, E and F widths. At best, I could only hack the metrics of Interstate's regular width fonts to copy the limited number of characters Series Gothic does cover.

The reason for this, of course, is because FHWA Series is a public-domain typeface that has existed since the 1950s as a series of mathematically-plotted definitions in the MUTCD/SHS books. FHWA didn't develop any diacritics because the MUTCD requires leaving them off, so what would be point in specifying them?

What is the reasoning for the MUTCD forbidding the use of diacritics over/under letters? There certainly can't be any legitimate excuse from the perspective of design and fabrication.

Regarding fonts in the public domain, there is quite a few open source typefaces that blow away Series Gothic in terms of language support and other typographical features. Quite a few type designers release some of their typefaces for nothing in a bid to make them popular and get attention from commercial foundries who might sell some of their other typefaces. It is certainly possible for private companies, such as Google for instance, to take on a type development project for traffic signs and make the results open source.

Perhaps if engineers and other designers stopped treating GuidSIGN and SignCAD as glorified word processors and actually designed the signs to spec perhaps Clearview would have stood a chance. While the misuse of Clearview has certainly had a large contribution to the degradation of the quality of signs on our roadways, automation in general plays a bigger part of that. "Eh, the computer did it, close enough."

Ugly traffic signs have existed long before the inspiration to create Clearview. The Clearview typeface has been an easy scapegoat for badly designed and poorly fabricated traffic signs over the past decade. The truth is many of these Clearview-based abominations would look terrible regardless of the typeface used.

Traffic engineers have their expertise in certain areas, but that expertise doesn't always extend into the principals of typography and graphic design. Talent definitely has a role to play in this. Someone who has an eye for good design is more likely to quickly spot a design issue while others with no design talent would be prone to overlook it. Then there's also the possibility no one in that traffic sign making department cares about quality control. And there's also the possibility some low paid schlep hired by the traffic engineers is doing the graphic design grunt work, whether he is qualified to do the work or not.

Oklahoma certainly has more than its fair share of badly designed highway signs. That's something I've been seeing the entire time I've lived here, and not just in the years Clearview has been available.

[machias]

...was Georgia DOT's flirtation with what it called "D Georgia," essentially a mixed-case version of Series D (glyphs never published and probably vendor-developed) intended to be used at 20" UC/15" LC in lieu of 16" UC/12" LC Series E Modified with some change in sign proportions but approximately the same overall area per panel. 

I wish more attention had been paid to Georgia's implementation of "Series D Modified" back when they were using it on the majority of their freeways.  The 20-inch letters with the slightly narrowed character width made for some excellent looking signs and in my completely unscientific observation there seemed to be less halation and the signs just seemed more legible, especially at night.

I have the "Georgia D" font - it's basically Page Studio Graphics "Highway Gothic D" (the older Mac BMAP version, not the current TrueType/OpenType version) without dots on the i and j.  I really think more attention needs to be put into studying readability of that lettering. The glyphs are close enough to Series E/EEM/E(m) that the letter forms looks familiar but different enough to allow for larger lettering on reasonably sized panels.