Street sign

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Traffic sign.
Multilingual road signs – Cree, English and French – in Mistissini, Quebec.
East Berlin street sign for the former Marx-Engels-Platz, with the Berlin Television Tower in the background (1984)

A street sign is a type of traffic sign used to identify named roads, generally those that do not qualify as expressways or highways. Street signs are most often found posted at intersections, and are usually in perpendicularly oriented pairs identifying each of the crossing streets. Modern street signs are mounted on either utility poles or smaller purpose-made sign poles posted on a streetcorner, or hung over intersections from overhead supports like wires or pylons. Up until around 1900, however, street signs were often mounted on the corners of buildings, or even chiseled into the masonry, and many of these old-fashioned signs still exist in older neighborhoods.

A street sign may optionally indicate the range of house numbers found nearby. Some street signs also indicate an alternative name for the street, such as "Fashion Avenue" for Seventh Avenue in New York City, or "Avenue of the Arts" for Huntington Avenue in Boston, Massachusetts. Multilingual signs are common and may be required by law in some areas, such as French-speaking regions of Canada.

Most streets have a traffic sign at each intersection to indicate the name of the road. The design and style of the sign is usually common to the district in which it appears. The sign has the street name and sometimes other information, such as the block number or the name of the London borough in which the street is located. Such signs are often the target of simple vandalism, and signs on unusually or famously named streets are especially liable to street sign theft.

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 Minneapolis, Minnesota. Within its city limits, all major arterial roads use a blue sign, north-south roads use a green sign, and east-west roads use a brown sign. Other places sometimes use blue or white signs to indicate private roads.

In recent years, many US and Canadian cities have adopted the mast arm for traffic signal equipment; major intersections are marked with large signs mounted on the mast arms. This was started in the 1960s by 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]

Gallery

  • in Bukhara

  • MUTCD D-3.

  • standard sign, New York City

  • "Midtown Manhattan" sign, New York City

  • "Historic district" sign, New York City

  • Historic Hungarian/German street sign in Bratislava

  • Street sign, Hong Kong

  • Street sign, Macau

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Street signs.

References

  1. ↑ Bacho, Katia (June 24, 2013). "On the Street Clarity". The New Yorker (subscription needed). p. 30. 
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