The Fake Freeway Sign that Became a Real Public Service | Hacker News Reader

The Fake Freeway Sign that Became a Real Public Service

good.is

140 pointskf40 comments

Is it just me, or is the writing incomprehensible? I have read the article and the author's site, and I still don't get what happened. He put up a sign. But what does the sign say? What was the part that was confusing? How did his sign make things less confusing? Where's the "before" and "after" pictures that I can compare?

I'm confused. Perhaps the artist should hack good.is and update the article with some text on what actually happened...

It is a tad overwritten. He tacked "North" and "5"(shield) on the empty space top left of the big leftmost sign.

Thanks. That's what I guessed, but your one-sentence description was much clearer than the article itself :)

This short video explains the whole thing better than the article and shows how he constructed and mounted the sign.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1442683884005576315...

The exit for the 5 North from the 110 freeway is a left exit with a wicked left turn. This means that a) people unfamiliar with the area don't know to be in the left lane to make the exit and b) because of the sharp left turn, everyone has to slow down to <25mph and traffic backs up making the exit difficult to merge into if you're late getting into the lane. It's a bad interchange because that one lane can back up for a mile during rush hour. It's such a poorly designed exit that Caltrans recently added in lights to the lane divider in the pavement to signal that people cannot merge into that lane within about 1/4 mile of the exit during rush hour.

Interesting. Thanks for clarifying.

Indeed. As a long-time Pasadena resident (and hence usually 110-bound from Downtown), I've learned always to be two lanes over from the 5 North exit lane in order to avoid the "viscosity" effects from the slow-down. I also learned the hard way not to be three lanes over; then you end up on the 101 North instead.*

Bay Area residents end up on "101 North", which is even worse. :-)

This does not stop people from changing lanes despite the lane dividers anyway... (also, you forgot c, the people who keep going in the 110 lanes because the sole exit lane for the 5 is backed up a mile to chinatown, who then try to change lanes closer to the exit either dangerously by going from 70mph to like 10 in a matter of seconds or by blocking traffic).

I've always wondered about something every time I passed that exit, which used to be on my daily commute for a few years. The exit for the 5 expands to two lanes immediately after the sharp turn. There seems to be enough room to make two exit lanes to get to the 5, or at least good enough reason to expand that little area to two exit lanes right there where there is currently some type of barricade. I wonder why that's never happened, because a two lane exit would probably cut down on the traffic and dangerous merging.

This article (linked to from good.is) is better: http://www.ladowntownnews.com/articles/2002/05/06/inn_enter/...

It's not just you. Apparently the author only expected residents of the area to read it.

http://ankrom.org/images/slideshows/happy_lion/pages/Gary%20...

My guess is this order: bottom left, top right, top left, bottom right.

This reminds me of an inicident in my town. There was a homeless guy who wore a uniform that looked a bit like the one used by the traffic police. One day the lights all went out and traffic was total caos. He went to the middle of the street and started directing traffic. At first people didn't give him much attention but soon saw that he was actually being sensible. So in the end he did quite a good job and traffic flowed quite well.

I find it really incredible that a sign that wasn't supposed to be there, on a major freeway, remained up for eight years. That's impressive.

Do you think there's some government official that drives from sign to sign, comparing each to his notes on what it should look like?

People are very rules based, they create certain rules for themselves to be able to cope with life and then force you into those rules as well. It doesn't matter how professional done or useful something is, if it isn't sanctioned and someone finds out about it, expect it to be gone.

They kept his suggestion. After 8 years, they added his "patch" to the new sign.

Except that Caltrans knew about this and decided to leave it up. Thus invalidating your entire worldview!

The story says he came clean about it in the news shortly after he put it up, yet it remained there.

You could say it was supposed to be there.

That was the point of the original artists 'art' - he made the sign old and dirty, so people would assume it had always been there and they had never noticed. It was about what people notice in their surroundings.

If you passed an old broken down house on a lot you had never noticed before, would you assume you had somehow missed it - or that somebody had created a mock broken down house?

It doesn't help that in LA the signs are put up by different state, city, county and municipal authorities that don't seem to ever work together.

Caltrans did know:

"Ankrom eventually leaked the story to the Downtown News, stunning millions of duped commuters, and effectively coming clean to Caltrans. But Caltrans knew Ankrom was right. For eight years, the sign remained."

I read that as "Caltrans recognized the correctness of the modified sign and decided not to roll back Ankrom's change."

Before I read this story, I had always thought that that sign was put up by Caltrans as a semi-permanent thing until they replaced the aging sign altogether. I've driven all over the place in LA for it not to matter because I knew of the (very badly designed and unlabeled until the very end up until about a year ago) exit to the 5 freeway, but it was probably a fantastic thing to people new to the area, since that general location is where something like 3 freeways meet, and if you wanted to get on the 5, there was a big sign for 5 South, but nothing whatsoever for 5 North, unless you maybe saw a small sign or something (I forget what it was) that said to take the 110 North to get on the 5.

As a cub scout I did the same thing, with similar results, just on a smaller scale. A couple doors down from our house, the road made a 90° turn north. You couldn't see 'through' the corner, and plenty of kids (myself included) played on the street. I hand-painted a Slow: Children at Play sign, and asked permission from a neighbor to put it in the parking strip in front of their house (they were on the corner). Before too long, the city installed an offical one.

I used to have a colleague in Akron. He told me that the city had dithered for months, if not years, over how to set up the parking in front of an area coffee shop—I don't remember its name; a 2-word name with Rainbow, or River, or something with an R?—to the point that a frustrated resident came by one night and just painted diagonal parking stripes himself. The result was so universally appreciated that the city didn't dare change it.

While not the same thing a few years back I was driving east on the M40 into London, and someone had painted, in big letters 'Why do I do this everyday?' on a fence. It was in a location where the traffic was often banked back. I wondered how many people sat in their cars, read that sign, and threw in their job when they got to work. Probably none, but a bet a lot of people wished they could.

California signage is the worst I've ever seen, at least in northern California where I've been for the past 3 years. Sometimes you don't know there's a highway until you're already passing the exit for it; the signs are often on the exit, mounted too low to see from very far away, and with the arrow angled downward as if to make sure you can't misunderstand which exit it's talking about. If you don't know exactly where the highway is, and you're as directionally challenged as I am, simply finding the right highway can be extremely stressful.

I don't get distressed easily, and certainly not historically by the simple act of driving, but driving in California is extremely stressful for me. There are at least a few thousand locations in California where some guerilla public service would be a great help. I just get angry every time I drive here, because I'm always lost, always having to turn around because I missed my exit or turn, and even when I'm in the right place I can't tell because the signs suck so much.

When I moved to Orange County 15 years ago I was told to get a Thomas Guide, a thick ring binded map book for LA and OC. It was always in the car, and was a life saver for finding where to go. I guess now the advice would be get a GPS.

Just curious, but have you ever driven in Boston? I think Northern California's signage is decent or better than most places.

Nope, I taxied and rode the train when I was in Boston.

I had a hard time with the beltway in Virginia/D.C. (I drove it twice and went the wrong way both times) and Denver/Boulder. I might hate them equally if I had to live in those places. I lived in Houston for 7 years and Austin for 6, and Houston has the nicest roads and signage of any city I've ever visited. Austin gets a lot of complaints, but I never had much trouble there.

I'm dysgraphic, and the directional component has the most noticeable impact on my day to day. If I have the option to turn and have no signs to tell me which way is which, I will choose the wrong direction at least 50% of the time. I occasionally get lost in parking lots (seriously, the big shopping center at Showers/San Antonio in Mountain View; I've been lost in that lot several times).

So, maybe for some folks California is fine. For me it is a seriously hostile driving environment. Luckily, I don't drive much.

That's wretched. Though it doesn't correct the overall problem, a GPS unit would help you a lot. You can always verify that you're on the right road and see how far your next turn is.

I haven't owned a car since moving to CA, and have rarely driven, so never bought a GPS. I drove down to Monterey this past weekend with a friend's Nexus One doing the navigating and things went without a hitch. I'm, obviously, going to order up a Nexus one soon, though I'm kinda waiting for the car dock to arrive. I just bought and RV and will be travelling a lot, so will need to have some sort of GPS in place. Standalone units have gotten cheap, but I hate to have unnecessary devices.

Works great when the artist is smart and safe.

Works poorly when the artist doesn't think the edits through, doesn't take adequate safety precautions, or makes a worse mess of things.

And don't even get me going about the people who think highway signs need more "creative" editing (the first "STOP ... Hammertime" sign was funny; the 15th wasn't).

My personal favorites are the stop signs with "war" scrawled on them. Right... because Mr Obama is going to be driving through your neighborhood, see that sign, and suddenly have an epiphany...

"Right... because Mr Obama is going to be driving through your neighborhood, see that sign, and suddenly have an epiphany..."

Or, maybe, voters.

On Stanford Campus we used to have an intersection called "The Intersection of Death" which was a 4 way mostly blind bike-only intersection of two major bike routes. In the middle of the night the trumpet section of the marching band erected a roundabout in the center of it complete with signs explaining which way to go. amazingly a week later it was still there and someone replaced the half-assed trumpet player statue they had erected with a cool abstract pvc sculpture. A few weeks later someone else added to it. The roundabout was guerrilla installed in fall and the university left it standing until the next summer when they tore it out and put a permanent cement one in.

This reminds me of the artist(s) TrustoCorp that put up parodies of street signs http://www.flickr.com/photos/45644444@N05/ although I'm sure their's are way more likely to be taken down.

How very LA.

Boston needs about a thousand artists like that guy.

Great idea, this reminds me of the guy who reverse graffiti-ed cities, by pressure washing them. Though a sign is more useful.

http://reversegraffitiproject.com/

Reminds me of Harry Tuttle, Robert De Niro's character in Brazil.

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