Guerrilla artist faked downtown LA freeway sign in 2001 | Hacker News Reader

Guerrilla artist faked downtown LA freeway sign in 2001

motorbiscuit.com

167 pointsjdorfman55 comments

Guerrilla Public Service Redux (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23325319 - May 2020 (110 comments)

The Fake Freeway Sign that Became a Real Public Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1047054 - Jan 2010 (40 comments)

My bad @dang. I honestly read it over the weekend and it sounded familiar but didn't think to to check HN before submitting.

No worries! It's fine to repost a story after a year or so anyhow (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

The article does a terrible job at illustrating intent or what actually happened. It's not at all clear what the sign was or what changed.

Articles like this drive me nuts. The entire thing piggy backs off of the video which is shown 75% of the way down.

Weak, low effort journalism.

There is an article? :) I went straight to the video, then jumped around it it to find the payload; it's near the end.

The guy augmented an existing sign with some annotations about the route number and direction.

You can see him working on creating the signage, and then putting it up.

Here is a better article, based off the video and the 99PI episode referenced elsewhere in this thread:

https://gizmodo.com/how-one-fed-up-dude-fixed-an-awful-highw...

(in 2001).

There was a 99 Percent Invisible episode about this as well: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/guerrilla-public-serv...

Much better than the article.

I know a couple of guys who took inspiration from this project and did something similar, on a smaller scale, here in Seattle.

There used to be a notorious bottleneck along a four-lane arterial heading downtown which feeds into a freeway onramp: for half a block, during certain times of day, one of the lanes converted to parking. Traffic would routinely back up for several blocks, as two lanes full of cars had to merge, pass by these 2-3 parking spaces, then split back out into two lanes again.

So... these two guys obtained hard hats, hi-viz vests, and indistinguishable-from-government-issue "No Parking Any Time" signs; one fine day they just walked up and installed them.

The signs have been there ever since. In fact you can look it up on the official Seattle Parking GIS map and see that the entire block is now marked "No Parking Allowed".

I remember a story about someone's children going through a civics course, which somehow lead to the children petitioning the municipality to install a 4-way stop sign at a notorious intersection. They got the stop signs installed.

When I see stories like yours, I just think that people have no expectation that government at any level will be responsive to the needs or proposals of the citizenry (which is also my expectation, frankly). I find that sobering to acknowledge.

Nice! Why does Seattle have so many highway-adjacent 2-lane streets which allow parking in one lane? Mercer is even like this once you get into LQA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Clgl63CWOkM

The youtube video of this is a work of pure joy.

So those who don't just click through to YouTube know what this is: This is a 10 minute documentary-style video of the event, made by the guerrilla artist himself. I have heard this story before but had no idea this video exists. Worth the click.

Surprisingly good production value for 2001.

I don't know about any one else but I got a very 'Max Headroom'/ 'Big lebowski' vibe from the whole presentation.

Here's Street View of the location showing the new, official sign: https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0555469,-118.2565176,3a,75y,...

If you go back to the historical street view for that location in 2008 (you may have to move the camera to the other lane, historical street view is quirky), you can see the guerrilla sign. Looks like they replaced it sometime between 2008 and 2011.

Edit: Here's a link:

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0556515,-118.2563396,3a,75y,...

For those wondering what the artist changed, he added "North 5" to the sign, guiding drivers headed for I-5 to the left lanes.

Why did Ankrom wait that long to tell the world? After seven years, the statute of limitations runs out and he can’t be arrested.

How accurate is that last part? Aren't there cases where the clock starts ticking from the discovery of the offense, and would the active attempts to hide it be a factor?

IANAL, but my understanding is that the time of discovery rule is only for certain civil matters, not for criminal matters (though plenty of serious crimes lack any statute of limitations). This would imply that if the government wanted to sue Ankrom for the cost of returning the sign to its original state, they might have a case, but they can't throw him in jail. Of course doing either would be a bad look, so it probably doesn't matter.

Can’t really imagine a jury putting this guy in jail so it doesn’t really matter

I was involved in the green party in a small town in the US a long time ago and we went through a phase where we were threatening "direct action" in terms of putting up signage for bike paths, improving signage for the bus company, etc.

Those threats got us an audience with the director of the bus company who thought we had a lot of good ideas but that it would take a while to get funding to implement them.

Our organization broke up in 2004 because we couldn't decide what to do about the presidential election, but the bus company implemented most of our ideas over the next five years.

There have been cases of people painting crosswalks when the local municipality fails to take action. One guy got arrested some years back:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-05/painting-...

Another one was painted in NJ and was considered "criminal mischief":

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2019/09/05/suspect-painted-own-...

FWIW I have a cousin who is involved in traffic planning in a different city in Ontario and said the eventual Hamilton response to the calming cones was fairly silly; they painted bump-outs on the road, which has very little traffic calming effect compared to physical barriers like cones or curbs.

Or bike lanes in New York:

https://untappedcities.com/2013/09/25/guerrilla-bike-lanes-a...

Off Topic (but not much) there is an artist (based in Florence, Italy, but born in France) that applies stickers to common road signs, often they are really nice.

Cannot find a reference in English, some images are on this wikipedia sandbox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Marcus1093/sandbox

and on this article (Italian):

http://www.art-vibes.com/street-art/clet-abraham-il-nuovo-vo...

Recently started seeing more of this called "tactical urbanism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_urbanism

- Reclaiming City Spaces With “Tactical Urbanism”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waiI9EQTdaw

- Tactical Urbanism: An Introduction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEHIgQTmK5g

If someone who is an artist does something, does that automatically make it art? If a non-artist put up this sign is it still art?

Yes, this is art. IMNSHO Art is anything that was done on purpose but wasn't necessary. As a result you almost can't help but to produce art. Singing in the shower? Art. Snoring in your sleep? Not art. Recording yourself snoring in your sleep? Art again. Of course whether it's good art is a matter of opinion.

As far as I know, everyone is an artist and everything can be considered art.

The trick is to state that fact early enough, when people start questioning your work.

For that matter, how is this "fake"? It's a real sign and is designed to help drivers by giving them accurate information.

It purports to be official, even though it isn't.

Much like a fake Van Gogh painting is still a painting, just not a Van Gogh painting.

The artists MO is straight out of the BLF playbook.

Bravo. Score one for the Bastards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Liberation_Front

I prefer our guerrilla artists in the UK https://secretldn.com/clapham-new-name/

> This happened in 2001

> CalTrans left the sign and eventually made an official one that remains to this day, 20 years after the prank.

Why replace it just to make it "official"?

I remember when the sign appeared and was happy to see it. It also looked pretty good, but was slightly odd due to differences in the reflectors around the perimeter. The sign faded more rapidly than the similar I-5 sign on the right side of the freeway. It had a nice, long life and should feel proud about the job it did.

Reflective signs have a finite lifetime and the rest of the sign was probably in need (where "need" is defined in large part by whether or not the feds are picking up the tab) of replacement by then.

> Why replace it just to make it "official"?

The original sign barely had enough space to fit the I-5 logo over to the left. The “fake” (and I use that term loosely) had 5 & 110 crammed next to each other and 101 way over on the right. The “official” sign spread out the choice of 3 freeways evenly, increasing readability.

Imagine if CalTrans knew about the fake sign, and the bolts failed prematurely relative to their official signs and fell on a car.

CalTrans actually found out about it after 9 months, inspected it, then left it up for an additional 8 years before the entire sign was replaced.

https://gizmodo.com/how-one-fed-up-dude-fixed-an-awful-highw...

> For about nine months, only a small group of people knew that the Interstate 5 shield hanging above the 110 freeway was a forgery. Then one of Ankrom's friend leaked the story to a local paper. And that's how Caltrans found out.

> Ankrom had hoped he could get his sign back from Caltrans after they took it down; he figured he would hang it in an art gallery. But Caltrans didn't take the sign down. His guerrilla sign had passed the Caltrans inspection.

> More than eight years after after Ankrom's sign went up, he got call from a friend who noticed some workers taking it down. It had been replaced with as part of routine maintenance.

Shit happens

https://australianweldingsolutions.com.au/tullamarine-freewa...

Do signs still use reflectors like that today? Was this before the 3M reflective material that is used on signs in the UK was invented?

In the US, it is fairly dependent on which state, how old the signage is, and who owns the road. On Federal Highways, I haven't seen button-copy (The small reflective buttons on letters & such) installed in a very long time. Sometimes highways will get signage updates to many signs but others will be reinstalled on new posts, so you might see button copy around longer in those cases.

When I drive through California, however, I see lots of older style signage or posts that is phased out most everywhere else. I suspect due to budget constraints.

The retro-reflective sheeting is WAY more popular and effective, but it's also very delicate and easy to scratch. I also think it only has a 10 year lifespan (technically at least. In practice states seem to keep it a bit longer than that since it's so expensive)

I don't normally like videos but I did watch the one embedded in the article and it was really gripping!

FYI it’s not the sign itself, but the NORTH I5 shield on the far left of the Pasadena sign.

The title mangler somehow got confused with "LA" and converted it to "la".

I was wondering if https://title.sh/ would capitalize it properly - nope

Works with L.A.:

Guerrilla Artist Fakes Downtown L.A. Freeway Sign

Is artist the right term here? Seems more like guerrilla engineer or guerilla highway management person.

I just watched the 10-minute video posted in this thread, and learned something new. His final process step was to spray a light mist of gray paint over the entire sign, to mimic the patina of the other ones sharing the gantry.

To me, that's when this went from guerilla engineering to art. Or better yet, both.

> Is artist the right term here? Seems more like guerrilla engineer or guerilla highway management person.

The name "Harry Tuttle" comes to mind. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dht_3NziwSw

Ooh this is awesome.

TL;Dr He put a small 70cm blue shield with a "5" on it on a much larger pre-existing gantry road sign.

the irony in this "stunt" is that this is the Libertarian dream: people paying for stuff themselves instead of relying on a government for public services.

so its not really so ballsy that he did it (aside from the potential criminal liability), and its not so epic that CalTrans left it up after they figured it out. But it is a statement to public sector waste that CalTrans did replace it with one of their own lol. Why.

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