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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.
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.
Oh, you're right, 100% of that money is coming from the State's fund for road sign replacement. NYC already has to replace 8000 signs a year due to wear and tear, or theft. They have elected to replace them with new signs, instead of identical signs. So while 100% of that is state money, 0% of it is new money. The Slashdot summary is actually another lie, like 99% of all Slashdot summaries. It's like if I decide "diet time" and so declare to my cat that next time we're out of frozen hamburger patties, I will buy the $10 box of extra lean patties, instead of the $9 box of medium patties. My decision cost me $1, not $10! In this instance, it doesn't even cost NYC more money for mixed-case signs, so their decision cost them $0, and Slashdot took $0 and turned it into millions, because outrage at government spending gives Slashbots a hard-on.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
60 mph = 88 feet per second.
Say the new signs get your eyes back on the road half a second quicker - that's 44 *less* feet that you've traveled without watching the cars in front of you.
Don't think a lot can happen in that 44 feet you traveled in that extra half second?
Stopping distance for a car going 60 mph (assuming 1.5s reaction time + avg braking distance of ~250 feet, multiple sources found through google report that this seems to be the average consensus, yielding ~350-400 feet as stopping distance on a flat/level/dry surface, for an auto traveling at 60mph.
So that 44 feet is about 10% of your stopping distance - a 10% larger margin of safety every time you look away from the road and read a road sign. That's not trivial, especially when you consider the hundreds of thousands of vehicles travelling around NYC. If it helps prevent 2 minor accidents a day, that's lower emergency services costs, slightly lower insurance rates, less money spent on road repairs, and less money spent on average by people repairing their vehicles. If the science behind the studies is sound, it does add up in the aggregate.