Original article... http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/09/30/2010-09-30_bureaucrats_or...

If you read all the hate mail I received after every Clearview article gets published, you wouldn't be surprised at all. It seems most people think the Federal Government paid me lots of money to develop Clearview when in fact they haven't spent a dime on the work. The sign makers do seem to be getting rich however.

The city of Toronto has been switching out their old street signs for new ones with Clearview for a number of years now. Mostly by attrition, so the cost over and above regular maintainable is negligible. I don't think the city told anyone about it :o).

Although the sheeting materials are only guaranteed for 7 years, in practice, the service life of a retro-reflective sign in New York's climate can be as long as 15 to 20 years. They may still look OK after that time, but the retro-reflective quality of the material is significantly degraded over time so they eventually become useless at night. It's a safety issue. Nobody should have to tolerate having to try to read non-reflective retro-reflective street signs in the dark in a city like NYC.

I would be willing to bet that that even within an 8 year time frame, the actual cost of replacing most of the signs would be covered by the cost of regular maintenance.

Well, I would think that many people feel that street signs that identify the names of streets, unlike major road signs - stop, yield, next exit - don't really have much influence on accidents. And they presumably also thought that those street signs, once put up, just stayed there - so that in 100 years, maybe 5% of them would normally be replaced through regular maintenance.

Of course, if those signs incorporate modern retro-reflective lettering, then their perception that most of those signs date from the 19th Century, and are just being torn down now by insensitive tax-money wasting bureaucrats is mistaken. But people do have a strong fondness for the familiar, and so they don't want a film crew to have problems filming a movie about the 1950s in their city, I suppose.

I suspect hard-to-read street signs would reduce accidents, by forcing motorists searching for their turn-off to slow down.
On the other hand, if they're spending longer peering at signage, that's less attention being paid to the road ahead.
So what's the diff?

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If U&lc is so damn efficient, why doesn't commerce adopt this mode of roadside communication?
Instead, strip mall stores go for the most "illegible" form possible -- Condensed Capitals in black, although the fluorescent background does help.

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The new street signs in Toronto are dreadful, because they're white lettering on dark blue. At night it's hard to locate the signs in the first place, before one gets an opportunity to read what's on them.

to you second point, Nick,

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Commerce's idea of legibility is like Billy Mays'' Idea of audible speech.

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http://images.travelpod.com/users/steph_444/europe_2006.1140390060.img_2...

I find it interesting that "Stupidity" isn't even written in the typeface that the story is referencing.

Dan

Typical street sign in Bath, England.

The alternative by David Kindersley which is fairly typical in the UK but still upper case.

I would have thought there is some merit in retaining upper case to differentiate a street sign from a directional sign as on the London Underground where station names at the station itself are always set in caps.

The old ones look nice but I'm pretty sure the new ones are easier to read. The minute road safety is called into question, function has to take precedence over aesthetics. I think Kindersley was interested in both.

This is typical of the messages I receive since the Daily News piece:

Subject: Other
Return email: fuckyou@yahoo.com

Message:
**** you!! Like we don\\\'t have anything else to spend our **** tax money on! Dipshits.

Definite improvement! Congratulations, James. Hope you can find some amusement in hate messages from morons :)

Just out of curiosity: this must have been a city decision not a federal government one, right?

Commerce's idea of legibility...

I live in NYC and think the "outrage" is, at least in part, manufactured by that newspaper, focusing on the "big cost." Russellm is right - it's not much extra money, if any extra at all.

The Guardian on the all-caps issue...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/mind-your-language/2010/oct/04/new-york-...

Given that the United States is spending all this money because it is believed that street signs in all capitals are not legible enough (the thread about 14 typefaces found on Berlin street signs makes me think the concern is overblown)... and thinking of Kemal Ataturk's decision to switch Turkey from Arabic script to Latin to increase literacy... without doing something as radical as adding a lowercase, or redesigning the script to fit it into a Latin-esque mold, have there been attempts to radically increase the legibility of the Hebrew script?

Does anyone know what typeface the street signs use now? (As in, pre-change?)