On the Road: The Language of Street Markings | Hacker News Reader

On the Road: The Language of Street Markings

lrb.co.uk

17 pointsprismatic6 comments

So, this article is about the UK, but there's one really interesting thing I've noticed about street markings in the US from looking at a lot of cities in Google Street View.

California has wildly different street markings from every other state in the country. The "STOP" and "SIGNAL AHEAD" markings in particular jump out of me. I've attempted to Google the origins of this, but I've yet to turn up any reason why California is so different from the rest of the union on this.

Also, it might just be my imagination, but broken lane stripes look like they're longer and/or thinner in California than in other states.

States are given some leeway from the Federal guidelines. California and FHWA have always had a tenuous relationship, so it is of no surprise that they have different road markings. At one point, California threatened to pull out of the Highway Trust Fund program because they felt they did not receive their fair share. The Highway Trust Fund is funded through Federal gas taxes and redistributed back to the States. Some low population state receive more money than they put in, while some large population states get the opposite. If California had pulled out, they would not have been eligible to receive any Federal transportation funding.

I've found that merges in California are also quite different from what I've experienced on the East Coast. It seems that in California two lanes simply lose their separating lane stripe and it serves as a merge.

Also, I find California's Botts' Dots[0] insufficient at marking lanes clearly, but I do like the tactile feedback.

While I'm mentioning gripes with California roads, the freeway/highway entrance markers just seem to be staked onto the entrance of the on-ramp—and often, if approaching, the sign is just after the entrance ramp.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botts%27_dots

> Also, I find California's Botts' Dots[0] insufficient at marking lanes clearly, but I do like the tactile feedback.

Various municipalities in Texas use them too (called "buttons" here), very inconsistently. I agree with your assessment; ideally, roads should use both paint and buttons, but that's not as common as it should be. From poking around on Street View, it appears that there are a lot of roads in California that put painted lines over the buttons, but I've yet to see any place in Texas that does so (except one road in Addison, but they've since removed the buttons as they're in the process of switching over to paint).

One thing interesting about North Texas is that you can actually tell which suburb of Dallas you're in, based on not only whether they use paint or buttons, but also based on how they lay out the buttons. Some examples follow.

    Legend: - = paint, . = button, ] = reflector

Dallas itself uses paint exclusively, with reflectors placed halfway between the stripes:

    -------------      ]      -------------      ]      -------------

Richardson places the reflectors at the tail end of each set of buttons, as if the reflector was a button, and they're wildly inconsistent from road to road about how many buttons constitute a set, as well as the proper spacing between each button. You get arrangements such as these:

    ]   .   .   .             ]   .   .   .             ]   .   .   .

    ]  .  .  .  .             ]  .  .  .  .             ]  .  .  .  .

    ] . . . . . .             ] . . . . . .             ] . . . . . .

Plano used to use four buttons, spaced out a decent amount, with reflectors placed halfway between each set:

    .   .   .   .      ]      .   .   .   .      ]      .   .   .   .

But now they're cramming in a second reflector in the middle of each set of buttons and tightening the spacing between the buttons a bit. They're migrating one road at a time to the new system:

    .  .  ]  .  .      ]      .  .  ]  .  .      ]      .  .  ]  .  .

Sadly my favourite road section to cycle has been altered, here's how it was in 2012:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5259235,-0.1244285,3a,90y,...

For those in the US looking for documentation of road markings, it is found in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, better known as the MUCTD. It is freely available at https://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/

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