Super-Sized Street Signs

By Perry Groten Published: December 3, 2010 on Keloland.com

SIOUX FALLS, SD - If you've been driving around Sioux Falls lately, you can't help but notice the signs of change on just about every street corner. For the past five years, the city has been replacing street and traffic signs with bigger and brighter ones. It's part of a nationwide effort to make signs more readable for older drivers.

Sioux Falls' traffic maintenance supervisor is gunning for fading signs.

"This is a retro-reflectometer," Gary Styke said.

An $11,000 gun-shaped gizmo would make Dirty Harry jealous as it fires a light beam at close range to go ahead and make Styke's day.

"You basically just pick a spot on the sign, pull the trigger, and it does its test and you read the display," Styke said.

Styke's weapon measures the reflective powers of traffic signs. The lower the number, the harder the sign is to see at night.

"Eight is bad," Styke said.

Check out how the new stop sign on the left eclipses the older one on the right when we let a beam of sunlight into a darkened room.

"We just had light coming through a window, and it's very bright, very readable," Styke said.

When it comes to traffic and street signs, bigger and bolder are better.

The city is squint-proofing signs all around town because baby boomers are getting a little long in the tooth. We're having a harder and harder time reading traffic signs from a long distance away.

"Our driving population is getting older and I think people are driving longer. Because we have technology, it just makes sense to make them brighter," Styke said.

The street department makes every replacement sign.

"There's a lot of art that's involved in it," sign fabricator Dana Fravel said.

Fravel creates a design at his computer.

"We have a standard pattern, which we've set up with our engineering department that's federally-compliant," Fravel said.

Then the letters are cut out with a machine called a plotter.

"And we can make any number of signs that we have in our sign shop with this plotter," Fravel said.

Fravel does the rest of the work by hand.

"Sometimes it sticks to you," Fravel said.

Then a spin through a press places 100 pounds of pressure onto the sign.

"This is what eventually will become our street name," Fravel said.

Most of the city's street signs have switched from all capital letters to a mixture of upper and lower-case.

"Psychologists tell us that when we see words, what we see are shapes, and so it's much easier to recognize a word with upper and lower case letters than it is to read a shape that's all upper-case," Fravel said.

The signs have a laser-cut finishing that makes them ten-times more reflective than older signs. Eventually, some 20,000 street signs will sport the new lettering, reflecting a safer drive through the city.

But the federal government may be backing off the mandate to make the changes. This week, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said it "makes no sense" to require local governments to spend money to replace "perfectly good traffic signs."

The Sioux Falls Street Department only changes the signs when they become worn-out. To give you some idea of the expense, it costs $40 to replace each of the city's 2,300 stop signs posted around town.