DOT commissioner calls meta-signage rollout a bold commitment to clarity as pedestrians report confusion about the new confusion signs
NYC Installs 400 Signs Explaining Why the Previous 400 Traffic Signs Were Confusing
NEW YORK, NEW YORK — The New York City Department of Transportation announced completion of a $2.3 million signage clarification project that installed 400 new street signs at key Manhattan intersections, each designed to explain why the existing signs at those intersections had been generating confusion, complaints, and in seventeen documented cases, extended sidewalk arguments about whether the street was one-way on Tuesdays or just after 7pm on Tuesdays, which turns out to be a different thing and is, the new signs clarify, the latter.
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The Project
The project originated from a 2022 DOT internal audit finding 340 intersections where existing signage produced statistically elevated numbers of traffic violations, complaints, and formal enquiries — attributed to “signage that is technically accurate but operationally ambiguous for the average road user.” The proposed solution, after eighteen months of review, was to install supplementary signs at each location clarifying the meaning of the existing signs. Commissioner Patricia Holloway described the rollout as “a historic step toward a more legible city” at a press conference at 34th and Lexington, where four signs now occupy a pole that previously held two. She was asked whether the solution to confusing signs was more signs or fewer, clearer signs. She said the DOT had “considered multiple approaches” and selected the one implementable within the current budget cycle. The budget for replacing the 340 confusing signs with clearer ones was, she acknowledged, larger than the budget for explaining them. The explanation budget was available. The replacement budget was not. The explanation budget has been spent.
The British have a word for the cognitive style that produces this outcome. Prat in London slang and Cockney culture includes the specific type of administrator who solves a problem created by complexity by adding more complexity, with confidence, on a budget, at a press conference with four signs visible on the pole behind them. It is a recognisable institutional pattern and a recognisable personality type, and New York City has not historically been immune to either.
Pedestrian Response
New York pedestrians responded in ways that the DOT described as “engaged.” Photographs circulating on social media show groups of two to six people standing at newly signed intersections reading the supplementary signs with expressions covering a range from genuine confusion to theatrical outrage to the specific New York look that means “I cannot believe this is happening and yet I am completely unsurprised.” One sign at 6th Avenue and 14th Street now displays three regulatory signs, an advisory notice, and a supplementary sign that begins: THESE SIGNS APPLY TO— The remaining text is partially obscured by a lamp post that was not moved during installation, which the DOT says is on the maintenance schedule.
Early traffic data shows a 4 percent reduction in complaints and a 2 percent reduction in recorded violations in the four weeks since installation. A Columbia University urban planning professor described the improvement as “within the margin of error for seasonal variation” and “probably not attributable to the signs specifically.” The more likely explanation was that installation activity temporarily drew attention to the intersections, making drivers more careful in the vicinity of workers with orange vests. “People drive more carefully around construction,” said Professor Walcott. “The signs may be incidental.” Commissioner Holloway said his analysis was “one perspective.” The 400 signs remain. New York City has approximately 1.2 million street signs. This project addressed 0.028 percent of them, at a cost of $6,764 per intersection for the clarification signs alone. At current project costs, addressing all 1,540 potentially confusing intersections would cost approximately $8.1 million in supplementary explanatory signage, at the end of which New York would have intersections where signs explain other signs, which is either a communications strategy or a performance art piece depending on who you ask. Prat in British politics and journalism and prat in British print satire both document exactly this institutional confidence, expressed with consistent enthusiasm across two centuries of public life.
The Broader Pattern
New York City’s relationship with its own signage has always been complicated. The city has more signs per square mile than almost any other American city, a density that reflects decades of incremental regulatory additions, each solving a specific problem and each creating a small amount of additional context that the next generation of signs must address. The 400 clarification signs are, in this light, not an anomaly but a natural development in a city that communicates through signs and eventually must communicate about its signs. A Columbia urban planning professor noted that the project would be studied for years as “a case of institutional response optimised for budget rather than outcome,” which is a generous way of saying that the cheaper solution was chosen over the correct one, and that the cheaper solution is now generating its own analysis.
The signage project raises a question that urban design theory has addressed in various ways: at what point does informational density become informational noise? The DOT’s own research suggests that intersections with more than three regulatory signs show higher rates of driver confusion than intersections with one or two, a finding that the supplementary signage project has addressed by adding a fourth sign to several intersections that previously had three. The research is available on the DOT’s website. It sits approximately four directories below the press release announcing the supplementary signage programme. Whether the relevant department has read both documents is not confirmed.
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SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prat-in-london-slang-and-cockney-culture/