69. Highway Signs
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The town of fun, north CarOlina is easy to miss. IT occupies a total area of just half a square mile, and it's home to fewer than three hundred and thirty people. Most of the surrounding land is used to grow tobacco and soybeans, but off the main road behind a series of chain link fences, and here, gates is the state's primary manufacturer of highway science. Inside the plants, workers are busy sharing giant aluminum panels, cutting sheet and Green adhesive, and measuring out the spacing between letters. And outside in the shipping yard, the plants general manager, we blackman, is admiring a role of completed products.

This, I am not here, twill foot tall. This is going somewhere on interstate ninety five in north china.

This facility makes all kinds of road signs, stop signs, yelled signs, construction signs. But its biggest products, both by size and revenue, are those huge Green signs that loom over you on the highway.

That's going to give you information about what would your own right now. The intersections that are coming at what is the next town coming, the eggs that inside .

point signs like this are all over american highways and freeways. There are literally millions of them. And there's so familiar that many of us don't stop to think about where they come from or why they look the way they do behind to every highway sign. There's a long and winding road of economic decision making. We want to make sure that we get a good .

quality product because we wanted out there for twenty years. We've got to be good stewards of the taxpayers .

money for the, for economics. Radio in network. This is the economics of everyday things, actually crated today, highway signs. Back in the early days of the automobile, al, thriving on american roadways, was a free for all.

There was no ordinated effort to manage the movement of vehicles, whether that be through road construction, a connected network of roadways, highways, traffic control devices.

That's gene hawkins. He works for the forensic engineering firm kittleson, and he's a professor marius, in the department of civil engineering at texas A. M. University, his one of the foremost experts on the history design and installation of traffic science.

The vehicles speak then would not be used to travel long distances anyway. And as the ability to travel longer distances increased, they created these trail systems, which were typically run by trail associations.

These informal networks of roads were a processor to the highway system in america. And along these roads there are very tremendous ways of telling drivers where they were and what was up the head. Most of these signs were hand painted.

Some had words, others had symbols. They were made from an assortment of materials in all different sizes and shapes. And the signs were different from place to place.

I've seen pictures to stop signs that looked like coffins, science with skull and cross bones on them.

as people started driving further and crossing state lines, they didn't know how to interpret all the markers they saw.

People started encountering these inconsistently in signing and signals and markings. And the state highway department people recognize we need to do a Better job of providing a consistent, uniform system of traffic control devices.

In the nineteen thirties, these efforts culminated in the manual on uniform trafic control devices, or M U T C D, for short IT provided to set up standards for traffic control devices across america's growing system of roads. Today is run by the federal highway administration, and every state in the U. S.

Adheres to its guidelines. It's nearly twelve hundred pages long, and IT lays out the ground rules for more than five hundred signs, markings and signals. Everything from the octagon shape of stop signs to the precise size of an exit sign on the freeway. These rules are determined by the national committee on uniform traffic control devices. Hawkins serves as the committee's chair.

The mmt C. D. Gets into issues such as the design of the signs typically will give some indication on when or how to use the device. Technically.

a highway sign refers to any type of sign that communicates something to drivers on the road. And the M U T C D breaks these signs down into three categories.

There's regulatory signs which tell you what to do. IT expresses the law like a stop sign or speed limit. There are warning signs, and those are a yellow diamond science, which warn you of a potential hazard, like a curve in the road or pedestrian crossing. And then there are guide science, which give directions.

Guide science are those enormous placards on the freeway to tell you which exits or intersecting highways are coming up and how far away they are. And everything you see on one of these signs is a calculated decision, starting with the fund. Most signs use a special sand serve type face that's unofficially called highway gothic c. It's almost exclusively designed for highway signs.

The spacing between the letters in the highway alphago bit is much greater than the spacing between letters on a print page for reading .

the words on these guide. Signs are almost always set in mixed case, with initial capitals followed by lower case letters. There's a good reason for that.

If you know what city name or street name you're looking for, you could recognize that IT was on a sign even before you could read IT. When it's mix case, for example, my name hawkins, the h sticks up in the case, sticks up the word english, the e sticks up, the g descent and the l sticks up. So if you're looking for the city hawkins or the road english, you have a shape that you're expecting to see, and you can see that shape from for the way that you can actually read the letters. And that was recognize as a real advantage when the traffic is moving at seventy miles an hour.

There are also guidelines around the size of the font on highway signs. And from below, it's hard to grasp just how big the characters are.

If it's an overheads sign, it's twenty inches for a capital letter. So the letter is almost too fat all in the general rule is the the space between lines of text is gonna be equal to the heights of the line of tech. So it's very easy to have a freeway sign that may only half, three or four lines of copy that could end up being ten feet all.

Then there's the colour of the sign. In the thousand nine hundred and fifties, the federal government looked into the legibility of black, blue and Green. Science officials staged a test with hundreds of motorists on the road in new york and found that fifty eight percent of drivers prefer Green.

Turns out the color Green has another benefit too. IT provides the best base for retro reflectivity. Basically what makes science legible when they're illuminated by a car headlights in the dark.

The reflectivity of science has come a along way. Engineers initially use something called cat size tiny marbles embedded in each letter on the sign. These have since been replaced by reflective sheet that covers the whole sign.

Most of the sign cheeking made in the united states is what's called microprism tic shading. And essentially, if you look at a bicycle reflector, IT looks like a series of ridges inside, and IT is a similar structure in microcosmic. Shading is just really.

really, really small. Now, not every sign on the freeway is Green. Some of them are Brown. Those are typically used for tourist attractions or recreation points like state parks. And every now and then, you'll also see a blue sign full of corporate logos. Those are called service science, and their purpose is to tell you what kinds of services and businesses are coming up, say, a shaver on gas station in two miles, or an arb at the next exit. These are actually ads and businesses pay for the real estate.

In most states, the logo signing program is run as a program where they contract that with a business who goes out and collects money from those businesses that want to put a logo. And sometimes they have to do a lottery. Sometimes it's so fitting process the businesses that install those signs and get the logos and everything they pay the state agency some percentage or flat fee for the ability to do that.

To qualify a business usually has to fall into one of a number of categories, gas, lodging, food, camping, attraction or pharmacy. And the fees vary from state to state. In aria zona, a placement can range from eleven hundred dollars in the less populated area to more than six thousand dollars in a busier urban location.

In other states like north CarOlina, IT might only be a few hundred box for state transportation departments. Service signs can bring in millions of dollars in revenue, but most highway signs aren't lucrative for the public entities responsible for them. Making them is an intensive and costly endeavor, one involving precision specialized equipment and in unusual labor pool that's coming up. It's estimated that there are more than forty million traffic signs on american roadways. There are dozens of companies that make the smaller ones, like stop signs or speed limit science, but few manufacturer are capable of producing the enormous Green highway guide science when a state transportation department needs a new one, the job goes to someone like renae roach.

I work for the north elana apartment transportation I in the state, signing in the liniment engineer.

Roach has a big job to go along with that big title. We .

maintaining over eighty thousand miles in or Carolan a any science, we lay out exactly where that they need to go. What do they need to say, destinations, road markers and things like that. You need the payment markings that out there on the road. We also place the fact as the color of the location of those .

most highway signs have a sticker on the back with the dates that IT was manufactured and installed. Roach knows exactly how long every sign has been on the highway. And when IT probably needs to be replaced, a good sign might last anywhere from twelve to twenty years before the natural elements start to degrade IT. But sometimes replacements happen far sooner. There is the analyst m.

you'd be surprised at how much for analysis. They may get hit or destroyed when a project comes through. Maybe the destination needs to change .

on those whenever roach needs a new highway sign, SHE turns to a trusted supplier.

The vast majority of our sons are coming .

through bunn in north CarOlina, a nearly every highway sign in the state comes from the sign plant in the small town of bun. Earlier this year, we took a trip out there to see the manufacturing process for ourselves. Is this whole thing we're looking at here? One sign.

yes, he is, is pretty awesome. When we get out on the year, i'll show you some really big science.

As a general manager who oversees the plant, lee black men is in charge of running day to day Operations. I talked to him on the factory floor over the sounds of wedding torches, and mdr says our plane is actually .

divided in the two different highs. This is what we all the project in. Where would manufacture are? Mostly you've going to go head sign as that you see there. The other is what we call the maintenance son of the planet. That's where your smaller son to say you're thirty, thirty six stop sons that you'd see in a rule setting your standard free limit sons about there.

The process for making a highway sign begins with a detailed blueprint sent over by renae roach at the north terina department of transportation.

There has got the exact explications that D O T walks for this sun, whether is the type of sheep, the color of sheep, the overlays, different things like that is all gonna on met. So this routing sheet is gone to follow this sun, all for the process and to the inn.

The first step of the fabrication process is selecting the right kind of aluminum for the job.

We use four different gages or thicknesses of the metal. Our largest sheet that will use is forty eight, about one forty forward, which is four foot wide, twelve foot low.

The workers hall, these huge shets over to the sharing department where they're cut to size. Sometimes signs are so big that they have to be split up into as many as fourteen different panels.

When the contrary, this set out on the job site, they will put IT to gail there. Like a puzzle.

the sheet metal is ended down to get rid of any blemishes or rough patches. Then it's coated with Green reflective sheet.

There's no paint on the sad. It's all shooting and it's all trans. Wasn't ink. This face in the world has called the squeal applicator. The machine is cents, a specific brush, and that will directly affly w the sheep through the video of model.

Then comes one of the more technical parts of the job, putting the letters on the sign for large highway signs. Each letter is printed individually and placed by hand according to very strict measurements.

What he's doing is he's posting out the horizontal measures for the land of copy. He knows half off from the bottom these letters are gonna be half all from the top and he's sitting all that he's gonna hand lay every one of these letters individually IT tells you the exact distance from one letter to the next, from the age of the sand coming up to the first letter.

See, you know, everything done.

the spacing of fun. You know, the space in the different size point. And that determines to, you know, vegas and bigger fon, smaller sand, smaller fun. These letters can only be off and eight of an inch, not a from start .

to finish. IT can take around twelve hours to finish a single large highway guide sign. Once the sign is done, it's taken out into the storage yard, their racks upon racks. Enormous highway signs are lined up to get transported all over the state of north CarOlina.

They sound right here, are ready to go, whether is going to a specific project on a specific road or whether is what we call a division where is gonna to a specific dot division.

Good highway signs don't come cheap. Earth CarOlinas department of transportation pays around forty two dollars per square foot for the sign itself, depending on the size that could run anywhere. From fourteen hundred dollars for an exit sign up to eighty five hundred dollars for a large guide sign.

Then there's installation. If the sign is ground amount, ted labor and support beams might run in additional eighteen thousand dollars, but the sign has to hang over the road either on a canto leaver or a structure that spends the entire highway. That cost could be as highest, two hundred thousand dollars.

But in north CarOlina, a, there's a catch that saves the state a ton of money. The bund sign plant is located inside a prison and correction enterprises, which runs the plant, is staffed by incarcerated individuals. That's a huge benefit for the state budget because IT allows for a roach to get a good deal on science.

They can just really generate a lot of those science really quickly for a purely inexpensive Price.

As IT turns out, many of america's highway signs are produced by prisoners, and it's not just science. Correction enterprises has plants all over the north CarOlina a that make reading glasses, furniture, can goods, license plates and cleaning supplies. It's part of a prison labor system that produces billions of dollars of goods every year. On next week episode, we're going to look at that system, one that employees eight hundred thousand people at wages of pennies per hour or even nothing at all.

The works wrote tough. So everybody, i'll tell you that they wish they made more. I wish I made more, but the government decides on what we should make, and that's what IT is.

For the economics of everyday thinking actually racket. This episode was produced by nee and series and mixed by jerrem Johnson. We had help from Daniel.

My father was a traffic engineer, city of using.

So you guys are texas traffic sign dynasty.

I don't know if I call out a dynasty, if it'd been a true dynasty. One of my kids, what have followed in my footsteps? And that did not happen.

The for economics radio network, the hidden side of everything. stitcher.