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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.
...it's a CAPITAL idea!
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.
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
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
No one drives in Manhatten anymore, there're too many cars.
because outrage at government spending gives Slashbots a hard-on.
Great free alternative to the little blue pill
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.
If you had bothered to read the article- yeah, I know, this is Slashdot- you would have noticed that they mention that the cost is marginal. That's because the signs would need to be replaced on about the same schedule anyway as part of routine maintenance. So a more accurate description of the article would be "New York plans to use mixed case instead of all caps during routine street sign maintenance". But that wouldn't get enough people angry, so they went with the more inflammatory version.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.