Multiple conservative “news” outlets in the New York area are shrieking today that the federal government is going to “force” New York City to waste $28 million to replace all its local street signs to change the lettering from all-caps to title case, just because it is more readable, less distracting, and safer. Naturally, they’re wrong on all counts, and, naturally, the actual truth is easily available and easy to comprehend, and, naturally, that doesn’t stop them.
What’s inna Daily News? I’ll tell ya what’s in the Daily News:
New Yorkers outraged as bureaucrats order city to change lettering on every single street sign
The city will change the lettering on every single street sign – at an estimated cost of about $27.5 million – because the feds don’t like the font.
And the laughable New York Post:
$27 million to change NYC signs from all-caps
Federal copy editors are demanding the city change its 250,900 street signs — such as these for Perry Avenue in The Bronx — from the all-caps style used for more than a century to ones that capitalize only the first letters.
Thank God there’s some actual expertise to bear on the issue:
Another 250,000 Signs That This Country Is Finished
The Fascist Federal gunvernment is forcing New York City to change ALL of its approximately 250,000 street signs from ALL CAPS to upper and lower case because—oh, you know why: the ALL CAPS signs are not as “safe” because they’re not as clear to read.*
*As a former desktop publisher, I can attest to the fact that it is true that a word written with just an initial cap rather than ALL CAPS is easier to read. But that generally only makes a difference when there is a string of multiple ALL CAPS words, NOT just one or two words. If anything, a street sign made up of one or two words in ALL CAPS is more pronounced, i.e., easier to read than a street sign printed in initial cap format.
Ooh! A typist with a mouse desktop publisher! OK, his personal imagination determines the facts, then. As it happens, though, actual experts at the Department of Transportation spent years developing and testing this typeface; it gives provably better recognition, at greater distances, especially for older people. Turns out there’s a reason for standards and regulations.
But more than that, the actual regulation is (you saw this coming, right . . .?) nothing like what these right-wing dipshits worked themselves into a frenzy over, and will in fact impose almost no new costs.
The federal government provides funding to cities for local roadway maintenance. The cities don’t have to take it, but if they do, the work they perform has to meet certain standards. Oddly, they aren’t allowed to take taxpayer money and just do any damn thing. And, oddly, the same government that created the highway system that unified the nation and supported its phenomenal growth, and which imposed uniform standards such as roadway widths, bridge heights, and, yes, signage, on those highways, which made it possible for everyone to use them without interruption everywhere in the country as long as they took notice of the regulations, also has standards of useability for its local roadway programs – standards that do things like increasing the safety and readability of signage on those roads, just like on the interstate highways. But of course it’s the cities’ choice whether to join those programs, and of course the cities all do, because it’s an obviously good thing. But nobody is “forced” to follow reasonable procedures and improve safety.
More to the point, the program does not require replacing any signs that would not be replaced in the course of ordinary maintenance. That’s right – the program does not require the city to remove a single sign that was not already going to be replaced. It simply requires the new signs to be printed in the approved font, which adds negligible cost. The signs generally last about 10 years and have to be replaced periodically; the DOT program has a 15-year phase-in period (in fact, it’s been running for about 7 years already; it took the wingers that long to gin up a fake controversy over it). As the Daily News itself notes, under its headline about “outrage”, and 10 paragraphs about a “cost of about $27.5 million” and quotes from “OUTRAGED” (their caps) citizens (“‘That’s ridiculous. They might as well just burn the damn money.’ ‘I see my tax dollars are hard at work.’”)
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 thecity’s signs would be replacedin the next few years anyway, Solomonow said.
Somehow, that had to wait until the 11th graf. The Post waited to the 12th graf to acknowledge that
To compensate for [cost] concerns, in 2003, the administration allowed for a 15-year phase-in period ending in 2018.
Although the city did not begin replacing the signs until earlier this year, Sadik-Khan said they will have no trouble meeting the deadline, as some 8,000 signs a year are replaced annually simply due to wear and tear.
So . . . the costs will be covered by the standard maintenance funding, the time limit is more than adequate to manage the change under the normal program of ongoing maintenance, and it’s a function of a non-mandatory funding program that subsidizes the work. Oh.
And the same organizations that reported these facts at the bottom of their stories also wrote that the city was being “forced” to accept a $28 million “cost” and undertake a massive program to . . . do exactly what they always do, at the normal pace, at no additional cost. This is “fascism”, by the standards of the right wing.
The reason, of course, is that the anti-civilization right wing is not merely stupid, uncomprehending, and bad at reading, but is deliberately so. They have to go to effort to work up lies in contradiction of actual facts that they themselves have read and reported – but they always manage to sink to the occasion. And the wingosphere is of course already spreading the fake controversy, culled from newspaper articles that actually contain the facts that contradict the lies those articles also invented.
It is impossible to be sufficiently contemptuous of these assholes.
To its credit, New York Magazine gets it.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
Oh thank you my better…please tell us what else we are supposed to think!
Jesus H Christ…the reason so many normal people despise those on the left is they are just arrogant dickheads. I’ll agree the replacement cost issues is mostly a phony one, but the idea that the Feds have spent money on “years of testing” so they can mandate a preferred street sign font IS ridiculous. Its the kind of nonsense you get in every bloated bureucracy that needs to justify its continued existence and expansion.
And to say contigent funding isn’t “forcing” states and local givernments to do things is semantics and you know it. Sure, technically the Feds don’t “force” the states to have, for example, the drinking age set at 21…the states COULD “choose” to set the age at 18 and forgo highway funds to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.
Hey, using that logic, why don’t we get rid of the minimum wage laws? After all no one would be “forcing” a poor person to take a job a $2 an hour.
I know it makes you feel better than from a NYCer’s perspective (and a leftists’s) that the $28M is someone-else’s-money from some kind of far distant general fund. But its *still* a significant amount of hard earned tax money that’s being spent for very marginal purposes.
You say NYC isn’t being ‘forced’ to fund this–but the articles you cite comprehend very clearly that the city’s funding gravy train is being held hostage to compliance with mandates like these. And as for myself, as a taxpayer, I find have very little option about paying the taxes that fund extravagant boondoggles—force *will* be used if I do not comply.
The Daily News and the NY Post aren’t off target, nor are the men-and-women-on-the-street they interviewed. Mixing in some crank from Lew Rockwell won’t change that.
Hey, spermburper, it’s about the Feds telling city gummint what to do—or is that too difficult for you mouth-breathing Demonrats to understand?
quick googling shows you can order the clearview font commercially (for an outrageous sum); how exactly was it developed and funded, that it is not in the public domain (as far as i can tell)? maybe the real waste of taxpayers’ money here is still an untold story…
Let’s see what’s going on here. One the one hand, the signs would be made more readable (though that’s a matter of opinion, really, but I’ll allow to stand as an argument for changing the signs). On the other hand, it’s going to cost 27 million to change the signs.
This does seem overblown by the news sources you point out, and they neglected that this project isn’t new, it’s been in the queue since 2003.
I disagree, however, that opposition to carrying out the maintenance on the signs amounts to right-wing anti-civilizationism. Is the idea of sparing those maintenance costs from the sign project and funneling them towards more pertinent projects such a radical one?
neglect maintenance, and the thing falls apart. you don’t want to call it “anti-civilizationalism”, i just want to have road signs to navigate by.
NN:
The font was developed by a private, um . . . font person, working with a lot of help from various other professionals and academics, then was tested and adopted as a standard by state, and then the federal, departments of transportation. Here’s a good article on it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/magazine/12fonts-t.html?pagewanted=all
It seems to suggest that the project began with some sort of consulting grant, but that doesn’t automatically make it public-domain. There is tons of stuff the government buys or contracts for that is proprietary. (Tang! Velcro!) I would like to see all government developmental contracts stipulate that the products are work-for-hire and owned by the public, but it’s not like this typeface is unusal in that respect. (One interesting counterexample: the Model 1911 Automatic Pistol – the famous “Colt .45 Automatic” – was developed by Colt under government contract and was never patented; the design is in the public domain, and today dozens of gun makers produce 1911s that are more or less clones of the original.)
SB:
It’s not a matter of opinion that the font is more readable – it has been extensively tested and quantified. (At 45mph, signs with this font show 16% more accuracy in reading compared to the older font, or, are equally readable at a distance more than 1 second further away at that speed. At 60mph, the extra reaction time rises above two seconds. For senior citizens, the readability difference is close to 30% under some circumstances.) See the link in the original post.
It will not cost $28 million extra. It costs $28 million to replace every sign in New York over a period of many years, but they have to do that anyway. The only effect of the policy is to tell them to print the new signs in the different font. The net cost for this alone is close to zero.
You can’t funnel the costs of this project to any other program, unless you stop replacing road signs entirely. The cost of this project is simply the ordinary cost of maintaining the existing signs. If you divert that expense, the signs will gradually fall apart and there won’t be any. Arguing for the breakdown of the physical infrastructure of our neighborhoods, I would suggest, is anti-civilization, but at any rate that’s an argument that can be made about any program – there’s nothing about the ordinary replacement of street signs that particularly suggests it is a good place to start the breakdown, or that replacing old signs with even better new ones at the same cost is an especially bad idea.
Assorted Morons Rescued from the Spam Queue:
If the “outrage” is bogus, the thing to do is stop defending it.
Decisions have to be made about everything that is done – even which font to use on highway signs. What should they do – make decisions on no grounds at all? How about making decisions based upon facts, tested against useful goals and standards – in this case, one that provides 20 – 30% more reaction distance than the old way, and works especially better at night and for senior citizens? How is that possibly an unreasonable goal? Maybe the cost of the testing wasn’t worth the benefit, but that hardly seems likely, given that it improves driving conditions for hundreds of millions of people collectively driving trillions of miles a year; even so that’s irrelevant, because in this case the reaction was to the cost of implementing the program after the testing was done, and the marginal cost of doing that is essentially zero.
The compliance mechanism for drinking-age laws (withholding all highway funds) is unrelated to the compliance mechanism for the street-sign regulation (withholding street sign funds), but thanks for playing.
There is no “significant amount of hard earned tax money that’s being spent for very marginal purposes”, since the cost of replacing the signs on the given schedule is exactly equal to the cost of doing what they would have been doing anyway . . . replacing exactly the same signs on exactly the same schedule.
Homophobic slurs and bad spelling as part of a rant about “the Feds” telling people to increase safety on the roads by doing exactly what they would be doing anyway at no extra cost . . . self-parody really doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?
Yeah, KTK’s post above pretty much sums it up. Any other perspective is petty an exercise is straw grasping to contrive outrage.
BTW, I’m home sick from work today and watching Judge Judy right now (don’t judge – that bitch is hilarious) and just saw a sensationalized promo for the local news where they are pimping this fake outrage. Ridiculous.
Here’s the other thing the wingers understand and exploit – scale. The average idiot on the street doesn’t have any idea what the budget of running something like New York City. 28 million – you know what that is? A fucking accounting error (or maybe one season of A-Rod playing 3B for the mayor’s office softball team). So, people hear $27 million and they think it’s a big deal, when it’s over 15 years and not even worth noting on a balance sheet. Those pumping this story know that the outrage of 28M for street signs will resonate with their winger base regardless of the circumstances around it, benign or egregious. The facts literally don’t matter, what they are seeking is visceral.
…The Dems could do the same shit if the wanted. Find out how much the NRA pays a design firm to change their logo and stationery or some shit. It’s easy to outrage a bunch of fucking peons about fiscal irresponsibility when they have no perspective about things. …Peons who routinely by $400 canvas monogrammed handbags, and $80 Ed Hardy and Afflication T-shirts with bedazzled skulls on them, and then get outraged about their perceived fiscally immoderate behaviors of others, that is.
FWIW, my above comment was referencing KTK’s post where he responds to NN and SB, not those at spammed camp.
so they can mandate a preferred street sign font IS ridiculous
Look, the signs are regularly replaced anyway. The cost between the old signs and the new is negligible. So, what you’re really objecting to is the Federal government forcing the city to use a particular font when they perform their regular sign replacement? Really? The only thing that’s ridiculous is the nitpicking.
Sure, from a really myopic perspective, the Feds are holding the city’s hostage. Like, they are preventing the cities from expressing their creativity and identity though the independent choice of font for street signs or something. (Am I really indulging this argument?) But, what is the alternative? Use any font you want? Okay, seems reasonable too… but all it takes is one idiot. Hey, maybe Sante Fe decides it wants to use Wing Dings, or Des Moines wants to class up their image and goes for a Gothic calligraphic font. I mean, what’s the harm? They chose a font on the basis of it’s tested readability. Seems as rational a basis for the decision as can be.
As KTK said, you can certainly argue whether it is worth the cost of developing the font or whatever, but that hasn’t been part of the outrage, so that’ a different question.
BTW, anybody ever read the “Traffic” book, by Tom Vanderbilt?
So, here’s the thing.
Let’s be cynical a moment and assume that the various media outlets at fault here have no principles at all and could spin a story any way they wanted as long as they got enough of the facts right that the couldn’t be sued for outright fraud.
Fortunately for them, they don’t have to meet any quantitative standard in order to say things like “New Yorkers outraged”. And they can quote any random idiot they want, and the only standard they have to meet there is accuracy of the quote. For instance, I assume that the Daily News wasn’t lying that Mr. Kelly asked his question that entailed the factually incorrect idea that change was to address a “pressing” safety issue. There’s enough New Yorkers that you can almost apply the Infinite Monkey Theorem to their opinions. You want an endorsement of idea X? Ask enough New Yorkers, you’ll find one. Then just don’t mention how many you asked. (I’m not quite sure how they can get away with calling the Highway Administration “copy editors”, but we can probably chalk that up to plain old hoping it’s not worth the effort to prosecute as libel.)
But ultimately, they all do admit that the replacement will take the next eight years. (I’m counting Lew Rockwell as mentioning it because it does like to a newspaper, and you’d have to be dumber than a biblical literalist to think that that block was a news outlet in its own right.) And that means that ultimately any reader who thought that this was an outrage and a waste made their own decision to think that scheduled maintenance was outrageous.
So, it’s one thing to point out that some media outlets are riding the very ragged edge of outright lying in order to spin an ordinary part of civilization into a story. But it’s quite another to make so obvious that those outlets’ readers are co-operating with the deception.
Oy vey.
s/like to/link to/
s/block/blog/
SB,
…the signs would be made more readable (though that’s a matter of opinion, really…
Really, Barbie? Aren’t you normally all proud of being a scientist? The results of quantitative research are now matters of opinion? Maybe you should go vote on that poll the Daily News has up to help it dispel those nasty government studies KTK linked to.
By the way, as a minor detail:
None of the linked stories contain any information as to whether the new sign standard increases costs; only the cost of a new sign is given, not the cost of an old-version one.
There are at least two changes to the standard, (1) the font and (2) the addition of a reflective coating. Somebody from the DoT is quoted as describing the cost of the font as being marginal, but the phrasing doesn’t include the cost of the new coating. Of course, the cost of the new coating is at worst irrelevant to whatever cost a sign manufacturer pays to use a new font.
If the font actually involved producing cast type that would then be used in a press, the cost could be significant, but not enormous. But it’s vastly more likely that the cost of the new font is the cost of applying a software upgrade to some printers, and paying whatever licencing fee is associated with the intellectual property of the font.
DanM – let me explain something about science: if it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, then relevance is questionable. Is reading a sing at 60 mph all that applicable to inner Manhattan if the average speed for driving on the grid is like 35, maybe 40 mph (for clarification, we are talking about the little street signs on the grid, afterall, and not the highway signage, right?)? I skimmed the article about these studies, and it seems to be based on studies for reading signs while driving on the highways, which if you ask me, isn’t a very good comparison to driving on the grid in Manhattan.
I’m actually in agreement with you and KTK about the sign replacement falling under the usual maintenance of the city. And I agree that the other news sources were politicizing it. Having read this stuff, it doesn’t ruffle my feathers. All I was saying is that I can understand how a person thinking about this extemporaneously might see it as unnecessary or imprudent. To clarify once again, that’s not the opinion I hold. I think it’s reasonable enough to do the maintenance under the rationale that things like this must be periodically replaced, but not under the guise that it’s necessary to improve sign readability in Manhattan. A scientific study in which people drove down a highway in the countryside isn’t a very appropriate comparison to driving down Lexington Ave and looking for W79th, scientifically speaking, so kindly step off my balls. You guys keep trying to twist my nutsack on what I’m supposed to think as a scientist. But what you’re doing, jumping up and down and saying “look, the scientists said so,” is exactly the same thing that those religious fanatics do when they rant and rave about all us sinners while pointing at the bible saying “look, the jesus/pope/cardinal said so!” It makes you look like an armwaving idiot, and trying to jam an apples-to-oranges comparison down the throats of the masses under the guise that “it’s science!” undermines the integrity of the practice.
First, my apologies. When it seemed like you were claiming that readability of traffic signs was a matter of opinion (an obviously insane claim), I should have looked for a different reading of what you’d said, since you’ve certainly earned a presumption of sanity in this forum. I’ll agree that the policy implications of a marginally relevant study are a matter of opinion. (Having walked near traffic in Manhattan, my opinion is that faster-to-read signage would helpful.)
But you know what, I stand by the idea that claiming certain professions entails certain beliefs. I’d misunderstood what you were claiming, so my criticism here was inapplicable, but the principle stands. Scientists, to be considered legitimate, have to believe in an objective reality. An EPA administrator, to be considered legitimate, has to view regulation as viable tool. These aren’t high bars to meet, and expecting them does not constitute being doctrinaire.
I’d offer a couple of slight emendations.
First, not every study perfectly answers the question you want answered, and, often in science, no study can perfectly answer the question you want answered. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to rely on imperfect studies (with an eye on their limitations). No doubt controlled studies of the signs’ readability on a test track don’t perfectly replicate real-life experience on New York City streets, but it seems to me they’re (a) clearly relevant, and (b) likely the best information available. Since you have to make some (hopefully informed) decision anyway, this is obviously the information you ought to use to make it, and since there is apparently no information to the contrary, you obviously ought to follow the implications of this information. The question whether the study conditions perfectly match the use conditions is not the question to ask; the question to ask is what are the best and most reliable grounds for making the decision that has to be made.
On the other hand, I’m not sure about your second point. I think it’s true that the attempt to grapple with reality privileges certain types of information: we have to use science and we shouldn’t use intuition or religion, because that’s the way truth (or our methods of seeking it) breaks. But that’s not the same as saying certain roles require certain epistemological stances, as I think your comment about the EPA administator seems to suggest. The EPA ought to employ regulation because it works, not because they’re a “regulatory agency” so they ought to regulate. (That would imply that religious believers ought to imploy myths and superstition because that’s their job, and torturers ought to torture because that’s what torturers do.) Science, as a search for knowledge, and regulation, as a method of creating an orderly society, are tools that work – that’s their only, and compelling, justification. Eschewing them is a bad idea because their alternatives do not work – again a compelling justification. But none of it is justified because “that’s who you are”.