“Street Name Signs - What's It All About”
May 2000
 

In the early 1970’s, the City determined that its street name signs needed upgrading. The City went through a detailed review process involving the Design Review Board (predecessor to the Architectural Review Commission) and arrived at a sign standard that was state-of-the art at the time. The signs were made of heavy (double) frame porcelain enamel with brown background. The cream colored letters had tiny glass beads baked into the porcelain surface for reflectivity. The letters were easy to read with caps and lowercase for best legibility. After the basic sign design was approved, the Public Works Department replaced virtually every sign in the City over a couple of years. Those signs have served us very well and many are still in use today.

As the years went by, however, the existing signs started to show their age. Porcelain enamel chips when struck by sharp objects (allowing the steel signs to rust), and the letters lost their reflective beads making the signs hard to read at night. The basic sign was also relatively small, with small letters, and in many cases had not been placed on consistent corner locations so as to be easily found.

By the 1990’s the state-of-the-art in street name sign making had evolved to aluminum blanks (no rust) with reflectorized sheeting for sign faces. During the late 1980s, we experimented with these signs at a limited number of locations using white, easy to read letters on a brown background.

As Public Works Director, I became concerned with the inadequacy of our street name signs in downtown, the difficulty visitors were having locating the older signs and the difficulty older drivers were having with the poor night time visibility of many of our no longer reflective signs. Shortly before my retirement in 1992, I assigned the City Traffic Engineer the task of preparing a plan and budget for re-signing of downtown to meet current Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices Standards. That project got lost after my retirement. Periodically, since that time, I have requested staff reactivate the project but with no success.

In 1998 Ken Schwartz was appointed to the City Council. He, too, had an interest in street name signs, though primarily from the aesthetic approach. Never mind that this wasn’t my primary concern, I now had an ally, and we were both assigned to work with a staff committee to arrive at new standards.

Over more than a year the committee met periodically to discuss sign blank and facing material, letter size, spacing, clearances, reflectivity, colors, reflective borders, letter style, sign location, sign size along various kinds of streets (arterials, collectors, locals) signage on state highways, the possibility of placing a special City logo on signs, details and ease of manufacturing (including cost), and pole installations, design and color. The final result was a detailed set of specifications for signs looking much like the signs adopted many years ago, but slightly larger, with state-of-the-art materials. The committee split on only two items. I wanted reflective borders to ease nighttime location of signs. Ken felt they were unnecessary. I favored the most legible type of lettering using standard caps and lowercase. Ken favored the libra font found on City letterhead, City printing and identification signs. This is highly stylized and distinctive, but often starts a name with a small letter, with caps within the body of the name.

Late in the evening of April 18th, the majority of the City Council agreed to use the reflective borders and the libra font. The Council agreed that the first priority for improved signage would be downtown, followed by arterial streets, collector streets and lastly local streets, replacing older signs first. Funds for the first phase downtown will be considered with mid-year budget adjustments within the next couple of months. The long range program will be considered with the Council’s goal setting process in early spring 2001. Meanwhile, all new signs installed will meet the new standard.

Media reports and public comments primarily dealt with the $750,000 guestimate the staff made to replace all signs. Staff recommendation of a three-year program was driven somewhat by a desire to begin the program soon and continue in an aggressive manner. However, there is nothing fixed about that schedule. All cities are under a mandate from the Federal Highway Administration, Department of Transportation (January 9, 1997) to have all new street name signs to be reflective and of a larger letter size than our City’s current signs. This must be completed by January 2012, so the City could extend the program out for 12 more years if it chooses to do so. If the new signs last for 30 years, as the old ones have, that comes out to $25,000 per year.

Although the stylized libra font works well for City stationery and location signs, I just don’t believe that slightly hard-to-read font is our best choice for street name signs that are often read quickly and under adverse conditions by visitors. Mayor Settle has requested that the Architectural Review Commission review and advise on the font, and I plan to ask the City Council to place the font issue on a future City Council agenda so the public can give us the benefit of their thinking.