The police on your road sign tell the story of a decades-long battle

Only those who pay close attention to detail have noticed something weird happening to signs on America’s interstates and interstates in recent years.

Federal highway officials have been unable to decide which font makes for the clearest and safest highway signage, leaving some states with signs written in a font called Highway Gothic, others with signs in Clearview and some places with a mixture of both.

This font saga dates back to 1948, when the Federal Highway Administration adopted Highway Gothic, a modified Gothic font, as its standard. The federal authority made the change following studies by the California Department of Transportation, which sought a font that was easy to read and would not interfere with drivers.

But this easy-to-read font wasn’t so easy in the 1980s, Vox reports, when reflective road signs became ubiquitous. The reflective signs were supposed to be easier to see at night, but because they reflected more light back to drivers, people – especially older people – had difficulty reading them due to the halo.

Halo is an optical effect that can cause the edges of illuminated objects to blur, as if it were a halo effect. This sometimes happened when driving at night and caused lowercase letters, like e, to appear like an o on road signs.

So type design firm Meek & Associates worked with researchers at the Larson Pennsylvania Transportation Institute to find a solution. What they created is called Clearview, a font they say improves readability by about 20 percent for all drivers without a change in sign size.

Clearview received the green light from the Federal Highway Association in 2004 and became an option for road signs in the United States – at least for a while. (We’ll talk more about this later.)

Although the two fonts don’t look drastically different, you can spot the changes if you look closely at letters like l, t, and d. You will see a slant at the top of these letters. The interior space of letters like a, o and e is quite small.

With Clearview, the interior space of lowercase letters has been enlarged to facilitate haloing. The tops of thin letters like l, t, and d were also flattened.

You can see an example of the two fonts side by side on a Texas road (below): Clearview is on the left and the old Highway Gothic is on the right. Look at the lowercase letters for the most obvious differences.

When the change was made in 2004, some states immediately began redoing their signage to be in Clearview.

But then a study out of Texas claimed that Clearview was actually no easier to read than Highway Gothic. The Federal Highway Administration rescinded its approval of Clearview in 2016.

Designer Don Meeker, who worked on the creation of Clearview, disputed the Texas researchers’ conclusions, telling CityLab: “They don’t understand design.”

“Helen Keller can tell you from the grave that Clearview looks better,” he said.

The saga doesn’t even end there. Federal officials changed their mind again in 2018, granting states permission to use Clearview on Highway Gothic, if they choose. In this case, the agency chose not to favor one over the other.

This brings us to where we are today, with an eclectic mix of road signs depending on the state and date it was installed.

An urban design video creator, who posts under the account Streetcraft, noticed Highway Gothic’s transition while driving north on I-75, starting in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, where Highway Gothic is still used, up to Kentucky where everything goes to Clearview. . Further north in Ohio, you’ll see both (depending on when the sign was installed), before returning to Clearview, Michigan territory.

Curious what font your state uses? Think of it as a low-tech road trip game the next time you’re on a long drive and check those lowercase letters carefully.