New York To Spend $27.5 Million Uncapitalizing Street Signs 322
250,000 street signs in New York City feature street names in capital letters only, which is not the national standard. Having no other issues on the table, The New York City Department of Transportation has decided to fix the problem and put up proper signs featuring both capital and lower-case letters at a cost of $27.5 million. The Transportation Department hopes to have the job completed by 2018 with 11,000 of the most important improperly capitaled signs fixed by the end of the year. Catastrophe averted.
Money well spent (Score:5, Interesting)
This is money well spent, at least on busier intersections, and exits from limited access highways.
Drivers can read / recognize mixed case from further distance than all caps.
It's not a great leap to conclude that with this change, drivers will make fewer last second swerves, or stop short less often. TFA alludes to this.
Safety increases ever so slightly, but for millions of people, and for many years.
Though if I were a NY tax payer I would prefer that they replace them through attrition. The fact that it will take until 2018 makes this seem to be partially the case.
Sell the signs (Score:5, Interesting)
The Wall Street signs alone, if auctioned, would probably pay for the whole project.
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Interesting)
All caps grabs your attention. It is why we still have STOP and SPEED LIMIT signs. You want driver's eyes to be drawn to them, because the information is important. Street names are not important, unless you are specifically looking for them. So for street name signs mixed case is better, because you can both read it easier when you are looking for a street, but you are not encouraged to look at them otherwise.
Re:Awesome (Score:3, Interesting)
What would you do if your pension plan -- that you've paid into for years -- suddenly decided that you need to be older to collect?
Then it might not go broke, like so many real-world pension plans have.
People live longer than they did when SS was introduced. If you live longer, you need to work longer. What's so hard to figure out about that?
IMO, Social Security should be allocated a fixed percentage of all national personal income, and the retirement age should be continuously adjusted to match the amount of money coming in. That takes all the demographic risks out of the system.