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Op-Ed Contributor

Easy-Reading Road Signs Head to the Offramp

Credit...Nicolas Ortega

Durham, N.C. — STARTING this week, a familiar face will begin to disappear from America’s roadside signs. It's not particularly noticeable — certainly not as memorable as the goateed Colonel Sanders or smiling Big Boy or pigtailed Wendy pushing their fried chicken, hamburgers and French fries. Rather, it is a typeface named Clearview, which has graced many of our highway signs and directed us to our destinations since 2004, when it was granted interim approval by the Federal Highway Administration.

Clearview was intended as a big step forward in legibility over the national standard alphabet typefaces that have long dominated highway signs. But late last month the highway agency quietly announced in the Federal Register that henceforth only older typefaces specified in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices may be used. The 30-day waiting period required after such announcements ended Wednesday.

The typical traveler may not pay much attention to highway-sign typefaces, but then that’s part of the point — to convey information clearly without distracting or confusing the driver. By the early 2000s, it was obvious that the set of older typefaces, commonly referred to as Highway Gothic and dating from the mid-20th century, before the creation of the Interstate highway system, were hard for some drivers to read, especially older drivers with weakening vision. Today, there are almost 100 million American drivers over age 50. These constitute about 45 percent of all licensed drivers, and those over 85 continue to be the nation’s fastest-growing cohort.

As one of those drivers between 50 and 85, I can attest to the fact that declining eyesight is one of the greatest frustrations of growing old. Years ago I had to pull off to the side of the road and ask my son to take over driving because I was experiencing double vision. That problem was corrected by reattaching a detached retina. Some years later, I stopped driving at night because I saw a halo around lights. Cataract surgery fixed that.

Needless to say, in these incidents highway-sign legibility was the least of my worries — until I began to drive again. The difficulty that aging drivers have in reading highway signs was among the problems that the graphic designer Donald Meeker and the type designer James Montalbano had sought to alleviate with their Clearview font.

As with any problem in design, the first step toward solving it is to understand how and why existing approaches fail. In the case of a face like Highway Gothic, the close spaces between the strokes of letters like the vowels a, e and u tended to appear filled in, especially under bright lights, making them indistinguishable to the reader. Also, the lowercase letters i and l were difficult to distinguish (as they are in many an e-mail message), and these effects were heightened at night by the reflective surface of highway signs.

Image
Although these two typefaces have the same stroke width to height ratio, the Clearview is designed to allow clear reading of letter shapes and word shapes at the furthest point possible for normal vision.Credit...The T.D. Larson Transportation Institute, Pennsylvania State University

In developing their alternative typeface, Mr. Meeker and Mr. Montalbano opened up the spaces between the strokes of difficult letters and made them slightly larger, so that Clearview was more readable. Under the highway administration’s interim approval, which offered Clearview as an option but did not mandate its use, about half the states adopted the typeface for use on highway signs. (Even with the approval rescinded, signs employing it will remain in use as long as they are serviceable.)

The Smithsonian Institution’s design museum, the Cooper Hewitt in New York, added the font to its collections and celebrated Clearview as “a beautiful example of design as a form of social activism,” because it made highway signs more readable for older drivers.

So why has the federal government reversed itself on Clearview? According to background information in the Federal Register announcement, Clearview does work well for white lettering on a dark background, but not so well for dark lettering on a light background. Also, the highway administration found that the “retroreflective” material used on highway signs created more of a problem than did typeface choice when it came to nighttime readability. Thus, the agency found no benefit that could not be achieved “within the established practice,” that is, by means of a modification of Highway Gothic.

Maybe. I for one find Clearview a huge improvement over Highway Gothic in terms of legibility, and I feel much safer driving in places where it’s on roadside signs.

Still, I can’t help wondering if something else is afoot. To use Clearview, state departments of transportation had to pay a licensing fee. Highway Gothic, by contrast, is in the public domain, and therefore free to use. In these times of tight budgets, money can surely make the difference, especially when it comes down to subjective judgments about clarity, legibility and reading between the lines.

Henry Petroski is a professor of civil engineering and history at Duke and the author, most recently, of “The Road Taken: The History and Future of America’s Infrastructure.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Requiem for a Typeface. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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