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New York To Spend $27.5 Million Uncapitalizing Street Signs
250,000 street signs in New York City feature street names in capital letters only, which is not the national standard. Having no other issues on the table, The New York City Department of Transportation has decided to fix the problem and put up proper signs featuring both capital and lower-case letters at a cost of $27.5 million. The Transportation Department hopes to have the job completed by 2018 with 11,000 of the most important improperly capitaled signs fixed by the end of the year. Catastrophe averted.
I thought New York was one of the states with a budget problem recently. Good job, paper pushers.
...it's a CAPITAL idea!
Because with the economic woes, war in Afghanistan going poorly... we need to rush to uncapitalize the signs in New York. Or the terrorists win.
This is a great initiative to implement when facing massive, crippling budget deficits.
Certainly wont pull in anywhere close to the cost of replacements, but I imagine authentic street signs for particular streets would sell for a decent price.
Leave the signs as they are, and refund that money to the taxpayers.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
All that will do is cause the UNIX guys to froth at the mouth.
Capitals are the work of the devil!
And the worms ate into his brain.
Does this have something to do with economic stimulus money that needs to be used or lost? I wouldn't be surprised with an idea this unusual and seemingly trivial...
I was getting tired of having street signs yelling at me. Damn all-caps street signs being rude!
and I know someone will have a very sophisticated argument for explaining why this is a good thing... I still think it's a waste now that it's done and things already work that way... why don't they give the $27 million in college financial aid or small business encouragement measure (yeah it encourages specifically paint industry, but that'snot the point)
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
The summary doesn't mention why they are changing the signs:
The Federal Highway Administration said the new sign standards improve safety because they allow drivers to identify words more quickly, allowing them to swiftly bring their eyes back to the road.
If you RTFA, you'll notice that street signs have a life of about 10 years. You'll also notice that most of the funding is from the feds.
So basically, this is a complete non-story. The signs will have to be replaced anyway, and the mixed-case signs are easier to read, leading to an increase in safety (though marginal, I'm sure).
But yeah, this is surely a waste of money, let's forget any investment in infrastructure, massive budget deficit means we shouldn't repair anything... That's some quality thinking!
lets replace the signs with leet speak. WALL st. will henceforth be named \/\/4LL 57!
Specks
Batteries not included
Don't you know, ALL CAPS is like yelling at someone! So they are working to make these signs more net-friendly. So when I tell you to go to 5TH STREET and BROADWAY, you won't have to ask me to quit yelling and I won't have to explain that I wasn't yelling and that is how the street names are actually spelled.
FTFA:
"The Federal Highway Administration said the new sign standards improve safety because they allow drivers to identify words more quickly, allowing them to swiftly bring their eyes back to the road."
Yeah, pointless government waste.
This is money well spent, at least on busier intersections, and exits from limited access highways.
Drivers can read / recognize mixed case from further distance than all caps.
It's not a great leap to conclude that with this change, drivers will make fewer last second swerves, or stop short less often. TFA alludes to this.
Safety increases ever so slightly, but for millions of people, and for many years.
Though if I were a NY tax payer I would prefer that they replace them through attrition. The fact that it will take until 2018 makes this seem to be partially the case.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
From the article:
The additional cost to the city, if any, will be "marginal" because it receives a steady stream of state funding for routine sign repairs and replacement, DOT spokesman Seth Solomonow said. The life of a typical sign is about a decade, so most of the city's signs would be replaced in the next few years anyway, Solomonow said.
They didn't follow federal regulations on road signage, but are fixing them now as part of regular maintenance.
30 characters are fine for a s
Because who cares if an ageing driver population can quickly scan signs and return their eyes to the road in an urban area, right?
I could have been set for life!
I guess $108 / sign isn't too horribly high since you are paying for gas, workers, equipment, etc. but damned if they didn't pick a horrible time to decide they needed to fix what really amounts to a non-problem.
There is a war going on for your mind.
The Wall Street signs alone, if auctioned, would probably pay for the whole project.
Replacing them over the next 8 years sounds like it may just be end-of-lifetime replacements ($3 million/year in replacing old signage seems fair). The budget seems big because NYC is one of the few cities in the United States with tens of thousands of street signs. I would love to see what NYCs budget is for repaving the roads.
If anything, capital letters are easier to read and fewer to learn (26 as opposed to 52). Foolish consistency should not cost $27 mil. Besides, where the hell did they come up with this budget. It translates to $100 per sign, seriously? All the while raising the subway fare every year...
This is classic governmental end of the year expendature. If they don't spend the money, then they don't get as much next year, It really bothers me when beaurocrats spend money frivolously like this just to keep their current budget the same. In my opinion, this is the kind of governmental overspending that needs to be eliminated (along with porkrolling congressional bills.) And here's a bigger question, WHY CAN'T THEY USE THAT MONEY TOWARD THE 9/11 MEMORIAL TOWERS?!
Fire every person responsible for this decision. Then put in a policy that when a street sign is damaged or worn and needs to be replaced, it gets done with the proper upper and lower case letters.
Hold on! That UPI article is deceptive, and does not tell the whole story. Check out the original article in the NY Daily News, which I found via MotherJones:
So the signs are going to be replaced on a schedule where they would be replaced anyway, almost all of the funding comes from the routine sign replacement budget, and the whole deal was arranged back in 2003.
This is a non-story that some political jerks want to blow up into unreasonable proportions.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
When driving in/around NYC, I always wondered why it felt like I was being yelled at. =P
$27.5 million because they claim your eyes will return to the road a split second faster, making the roads safer? Please provide some fact to back up that claim. How many accidents are officially recognized as being caused by the driver not being able to read a street sign fast enough?
Given that they've removed the teaching of English grammar in the public schools in NYC, this might actually be the only lesson New Yorkers get on proper capitalization.
number of accidents caused by street signs being in all capitals.
for a CAPSLOCK street.
Since people like FHWA and Penn State did experiments (omg with tax dollarz!!1!) and found it out that mixed type was easier and fonts like Clearview make a noticeable difference.
But let's be all Tea Party and trust a random 37 year old maintenance guy instead.
Please get rid of that ancient Pentium.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
I mean, reading all capital letters from a far is easier right?
where people write and approve troll articles to increase page views. Next up: "THE GUBMINT IS COMIN TO TAKE UR GUNS AWAY!!"
WTF...no one the state is broke and constantly trying to rip off its population. NYC is the money sink hole of everyone else in the states tax money.
Higher taxes, low paying jobs, less jobs, horrible weather, stupid laws. NY ftw.
The working theory is that New York wants every citizen and business of the state to move to another state, so they can turn the entire state into a landfill.
[pedantic]
http://begthequestion.info/
Seriously, learn these things before trying to put them into practice.
[/pedantic]
$27.5 million for 250,000 signs. That's $110 a sign. If an average sign has about 9-11 letters that's about $10-12 a letter.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's about time they stopped shouting.
I'm very fussy myself about the correct use of capitalisation. However, I think this may actually be a case where capitalisation is acceptable.
To state the obvious these are street signs with street names on. They are not part of a list of names, a letter, an article, part of a sentence, etc. In this case, clear capitalised letters are permissible. They're clear, bold, dis-ambiguous, so on. No accents, Serifs, or similar.
I find the notion that non-capitalised street names are faster to process interesting, but where is the scientific evidence to back it up? As far as I am concerned, no data means to me that this is an opinion someone has utilised to force what they believe to be absolute correct use of English.
I heard this on the radio yesterday, and I live in NYC. For those of you that think this is a lot of money, you obviously don't live in a large city, certainly not one as big as NYC. Usually, every project here runs into billions of dollars. Just patching the potholes is billions. When it snows in NYC, snow removal is billions. 27.5 million is chicken feed. That's what Wall Street Bankers spend on lunch. It's actually a hell of a deal when you consider how many street signs you're talking about. I think it comes down to less than $110 per. And you're paying a union crew for the replacement! So really, not a bad thing. Slashdot, like the NY Post, is sexing up the story to make it look like Govt Waste. But in reality, it's just infrastructure maintenance.
Now if they could just patch up the BQE. In Feb I really had a tire blow out after hitting a pothole. Tire replacement was $85. So, that's almost the price of one sign. So, I wonder what was the total cost of that pothole if even 1% of driving NY'ers hit that pothole?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Oh I'm sorry, it's $110 a sign. I omitted the .5 part of the $27.5 million.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I think that's pretty much the only question that needs asking.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I loved your proposed signature... so I stole it.
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that making NYNY's unique aesthetics look like everywhere else's just diminishes the uniqueness of NYNY?
It already let the rest of the world get ahead of it on the skyline thing.
Next they'll be letting cabs be any color and shape they want, and putting coffee in styrofoam...
NYC isn't just another hive. It's a theater, and it needs competent art-direction if it wants to continue to win awards.
man I'd pay billions in tax payer dollars to get 'em fixed. what a deal!
Love it.
I don't know what's more ridiculous, that it costs $110 to replace each sign or that it's actually going to take them 8 years to replace them all. Only in America.
According to this article: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041219171930.htm the new signage typeface is apparently based on solid research which shows that drivers can read signs 20% faster.
Rename all the streets. Wall St., for instance, would then properly be identified as “WALL ST.”...
Wall Street, where treason really happens!
They made this about budget by burying the key information in the last paragraph. The typical lifespan of a street sign is about 10 years. The replacement is happening roughly on schedule and would have taken place with or without changing the standards. They're spending a bit over $100 per sign (about $10/year each) including the labor costs of the swap-out.
The more accurate headline would be "New standard for New York Street Signs: city will update as the old signs wear out.".
Replace all the other street signs in the US with all-caps. All-caps signage is slower to read, but they can be read without squinting.
Somehow I don't think the idea will go over well, though...
They should have linked a CSS stylesheet into all the signs, and then just inserted something like .sign-text {
text-transform: lowercase;
}
How about school lunches, school books, teachers' salaries, scholarships, poverty amelioration? I know 27 million bucks isn't a lot of money, but as the saying goes, "a million here, a million there, and soon you're talking real money". Illiterate kids going hungry in NYC, and the city is putting up new street signs? Gimme a break! How about investing in a future in which citizens are actually capable of READING the street signs? I don't give a damn which level of government the money is coming from, or what it was earmarked for in some dunderheaded budget. We need to get our priorities straight.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
They should spend that money on cleaning up the filthy subway stations.
I have a really hard time believing that those signs can be made and swapped out at a cost of only 108 dollars each. Seems like the sign along would cost twice that.
The facts undermine sarcasm and inherent tone critical of wasteful spending: "DOT spokesman Seth Solomonow said additional costs to the city would be "marginal" because it receives state funding for routine repairs and that given a street sign's typical lifespan of a decade, the signs would have been replaced anyway."
Either you didn't read the article you submitted or decided to use slashdot to generate political controversy where none is merited.
Just insert a small "\L" after the first letter.
Reminds me that the last time such a directive came down from DOT, New York City . Which was a bit of a shame. A minor issue in the grand scheme of things but just another sign of the marching blandicization of modern society.
Why are they noticing this only now?? I remember the days when each of the 5 boroughs had different background colors for their street signs (Brooklyn was Black, Queens was White, Bronx as Blue, Manhattan was Yellow, and Staten Island was Gold). I miss those days - made it very easy to figure out when you crossed the border between Brooklyn and Queens. Anyway, around 1981 they started replacing the unique colors with generic green and white signs, per federal requirements, supposedly. So if the feds say that signs must be mixed case, why the hell didn't they notice it then??
And by the way, I have seen a few images of the new street signs - they look terribly generic. The all-caps was one of the things that made NYC street signs so distinguished.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
I loved your proposed signature... so I stole it.
That's alright, so did he (or she, it's not always easy to tell online).
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Come on, you're all supposed to be techies here! Not one comment about the technology of the roadsigns?
I don't even do tech for a living, but even I thought to question:
-- Hmmm, the newly required fonts are Clearview fonts...
-- Are these the open or closed version of Clearview fonts?
-- If closed, does the cost to NYC include payment of a licensing fee? If so, to whom?
--Cui bono? Government rarely spends money unless they're greasing palms. Especially money spent as stupidly as this.
Apparently the city has decided that the signs are no longer AOL newbies.