New York City to change the style of its street signs: Goodbye to all-caps style
BROADWAY is becoming Broadway, and it will cost New York City $27.6 million. The US Federal Highway Administration decided that capital letters can be dangerous, and the city is now obliged to replace 250,900 street signs with versions that capitalise only the first letter.
The reasoning is not aesthetic. As the New York Post put it, studies have shown that it is harder to read all-caps signs, and those extra milliseconds spent staring away from the road have been shown to increase the likelihood of accidents, particularly among older drivers. Milliseconds sound trivial until you convert them into distance. At 40 mph a car covers roughly 18 metres every second. Half a second of extra reading time is nine metres of road travelled blind.
Why capitals are slower to read
Typographers have known this for a century, though the evidence has been argued over for almost as long. Lower-case words have shape. The ascenders in "Broadway", the b and the d and the y that drops below the line, produce a distinct silhouette that a reader recognises before decoding a single letter. Set the same word in capitals and every letter becomes a rectangle of identical height. The word becomes a wall. The eye has to work through it letter by letter.
The effect is small in a book, where the reader has all the time in the world. It is not small at speed, in rain, at night, at 65, when the reader is also steering. Legibility research in transport is a distinct field precisely because the failure mode is a crash rather than a headache.
Clearview, the font built for the job
A new typeface, Clearview, was developed specifically for this problem. Its designers widened the gaps inside letters, opened up the apertures on the c and the e and the s, and tuned the letterforms so that the halo of glare thrown off retroreflective sheeting at night does not smear one character into the next. That halation effect is the reason road lettering cannot simply borrow a good book face.
Clearview replaced Highway Gothic, the American road alphabet drawn in the 1940s, on a swathe of federal signage, and the field trials that supported it claimed meaningful gains in recognition distance for older drivers. The typeface has had a complicated regulatory life since, with federal approval withdrawn and then restored, which is an unusual amount of drama for a set of letterforms.
The cost, in perspective
The $27.6 million figure generated the predictable outrage, and the predictable outrage was mostly wrong. New York already replaces roughly 8,000 street signs every year through ordinary wear and tear, vandalism and collisions, at around $110 each. The new rules do not require the city to strip its poles overnight. They require it to fit the new style as signs come up for replacement anyway. Spread across a normal replacement cycle, the marginal cost of the change is a fraction of the headline number.
- 250,900 signs to be converted across the five boroughs
- Roughly 8,000 signs already replaced each year as routine maintenance
- About $110 per sign under normal conditions
- Federal rules set the standard, the city pays for the metal
A quieter city
Janette Sadik-Khan, the city's transportation commissioner at the time and the driving force behind its pedestrian plazas and protected bike lanes, could not resist the obvious line. "On the internet, writing in all caps means you are shouting," she said. "Our new signs can quiet down, as well."
It was a joke with a serious edge. She argued the change reflected a kinder, gentler New York, and the sign programme sat alongside a broader push to make the street feel like something other than a machine for moving cars. Signage is the most-read text in any city. Nobody chooses to read it and everybody does.
Signs, meaning and the people who cannot read them
There is a second problem sitting behind the first, and New York has it worse than almost anywhere. Roughly half of the city's residents speak a language other than English at home, and a large minority speak English less than very well. A sign that is technically legible is still useless if the word on it means nothing to the person reading it.
Transport agencies solve this with pictograms wherever they can, because a symbol carries no grammar, and with careful translation services wherever they cannot, on the parking rules, the detour notices and the emergency instructions that must be understood exactly. Getting that wrong has consequences that are legal as well as practical, since a fine issued on the basis of a sign the driver could not understand is a fine that gets contested.
What the change really represents
Street signs are infrastructure that happens to be made of language. The decision to abolish all-caps was made on the basis of eye-tracking data, crash statistics and a set of federal specifications, not on taste, and it is one of the rare cases where typography is regulated because it is a safety device.
The full specification lives in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, published by the Federal Highway Administration, which governs everything from letter height to the exact shade of green. The typeface at the centre of the row, Clearview, still generates arguments among designers in places like r/typography, where the debate is less about safety than about whether it actually looks better. On a wet night on the Grand Central Parkway, that is not the question that matters.