Street name sign

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Traffic sign.
Road name sign of East Chang'an Avenue, Beijing
Fort William, Scotland
, in both Scottish Gaelic and English

A street name sign is a type of

roads, generally those that do not qualify as expressways or highways. Street name signs are most often found posted at intersections
; sometimes, especially in the United States, in perpendicularly oriented pairs identifying each of the crossing streets.

Description

Cast aluminium City of Oxford street nameplate - manufactured by The Royal Label Factory
Trilingual street name signs in the Serbian, Slovak, and Hungarian languages, in the village of Belo Blato, Serbia
Standard sign, New York City
Different boroughs in London have their own designs for street name signs. These examples also include part of the postcode (WC2)

Modern street nameplates (name signs) may be mounted in various ways, such as attached to walls or on

utility poles or smaller purpose-made sign poles posted on a streetcorner, or hung over intersections from overhead supports like wires or pylons. When attached to poles, they may be stacked onto each other in alternating directions or mounted perpendicular to each other, with each sign facing the street it represents. Until around 1900 in the US, however, street name signs were often mounted on the corners of buildings, or even chiseled into the masonry
, and many of those signs still exist in older neighborhoods. They are commonly used in France and the United Kingdom. The design and style of the sign is usually common to the district in which it appears.

Some street nameplates also indicate the range of

Multilingual signs are common and may be required by law in some areas, such as French-speaking regions of Canada. Multilingual signs are sometimes primarily used to promote local minority languages. See bilingual sign
for more information.

Occasionally some signs are a target for vandalism, for example in areas of language controversy; and signs on unusually or famously named streets (perhaps those containing a humorous or obscene word) are especially liable to street sign theft.

In recent years, many US and Canadian cities have adopted the

California Department of Transportation. Los Angeles and San Francisco started in the 1970s and recently New York City has introduced the bigger signs at its intersections. In 2013, New York City began to change street signs that have been previously used Highway Gothic font for a new one, Clearview, that include both upper and lower case letters, which is considered more readable.[1]

Color coding and typography

Street sign corner in Tartu, Estonia

Usually, the color scheme used on the sign just reflects the local standard (for example, white letters on a green background are common throughout the US). However, in some cases, the color of a sign can provide information, as well. One example can be found in

city limits
, all roads designated as a snow emergency route use a blue sign; these are typically major arterial routes. Other roads have green signs. Other places sometimes use blue or white signs to indicate private roads.

As of 2009, the

management district, where property owners assess additional fees to themselves to pay for extra services) to be of significantly different color schemes and fonts from the citywide standard. Since the new MUTCD standard was adopted, some cities have begun transitioning from noncompliant colors. San Jose, California
traditionally used white letters on a black background on its street name signs for many decades, but shifted during the 2010s to white letters on a green background.

In 1952 in the UK,

Ministry of Transport, which required new lettering to use on United Kingdom road signs. Although the Road Research Laboratory found Kindersley's design more legible, the all-capitals design with serifs was passed over in favour of that of Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert. Many of the street signs in Britain use Kindersley fonts.[3]

Gallery

See also

References

  1. ^ Bacho, Katia (June 24, 2013). "On the Street Clarity". The New Yorker (subscription needed). p. 30.
  2. ^ "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices 2009 Edition Chapter 2D. Guide Signs—Conventional Roads". Federal Highway Administration. Retrieved March 4, 2015.
  3. ^ Richard Kindersley Studio official website

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Street signs.
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