69. Highway Signs

Summary

The Economics of Everyday Things: Episode 69 – Highway Signs

Host: Zachary Crockett
Release Date: November 4, 2024
Produced by: Freakonomics Network & Zachary Crockett

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Introduction: The Unseen Backbone of Roadways

In Episode 69 of The Economics of Everyday Things, host Zachary Crockett delves into the often-overlooked world of highway signs. While millions travel America’s highways daily, few ponder the intricate processes and economic decisions behind the ubiquitous signs that guide them. This episode uncovers the manufacturing, standardization, and economic implications of highway signage, revealing a complex system that ensures road safety and efficiency.

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Manufacturing Hub: Bun, North Carolina

The episode opens in the small town of Bun, North Carolina, home to the state's primary highway sign manufacturer. Despite its modest size—covering half a square mile with fewer than 330 residents—the plant plays a pivotal role in the production of millions of traffic signs across the United States.

Lee Blackman, the plant’s general manager, showcases the facility:

Lee Blackman [01:54]: "This sign right here is 12 foot tall. This is going somewhere on Interstate 95 in North Carolina."

At the Bun plant, workers engage in tasks such as shearing aluminum panels, applying green adhesive sheets, and meticulously spacing letters on signs. Blackman emphasizes the importance of quality and precision in sign manufacturing:

Lee Blackman [02:16]: "That's going to give you information about what road you're on right now, the intersections that are coming up, what is the next town coming up, the exit, and so forth."

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Historical Context: From Chaos to Order

Zachary Crockett provides a historical backdrop, illustrating how the absence of standardized signs once turned American roads into a "free for all."

Gene Hawkins, a forensic engineering expert from Kittelson and Chair of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, explains:

Gene Hawkins [03:17]: "There was no coordinated effort to manage the movement of vehicles, whether it be through road construction, a connected network of roadways, highways, traffic control devices."

The lack of uniformity led to confusion among drivers, especially as automobile travel distances increased. This chaos spurred the creation of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) in the 1930s, a comprehensive 1,200-page guide governing over 500 signs, markings, and signals nationwide. The MUTCD ensures consistency, enhancing driver safety and comprehension.

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Design Elements: Crafting Legibility and Efficiency

Highway signs are meticulously designed for maximum legibility and functionality. The MUTCD categorizes signs into three main types:

1. Regulatory Signs – Indicate legal requirements (e.g., stop signs, speed limits).
2. Warning Signs – Alert drivers to potential hazards (e.g., curves, pedestrian crossings).
3. Guide Signs – Provide directional information (e.g., exits, distances).

Gene Hawkins elaborates on these categories:

Gene Hawkins [06:15]: "There's regulatory signs which tell you what to do. ... warning signs, and those are our yellow diamond signs ... and then there are guide signs which give directions."

Key design features include the highway gothic sans-serif typeface, larger letter spacing for readability at high speeds, and mixed-case lettering to create recognizable word shapes even before the text is fully deciphered.

Gene Hawkins [07:24]: "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."

Colors are chosen based on legibility and functionality. Green signs, preferred by 58% of drivers in tests, offer optimal retroreflectivity, enhancing visibility at night via reflective sheeting.

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Manufacturing Process: From Blueprint to Highway

The Bun sign plant operates with exceptional precision. The process begins with detailed blueprints from Rene Roach, the North Carolina Department of Transportation’s signing and delineation engineer.

Lee Blackman [17:24]: "Specifications that DOT wants for this sign. Whether it's the type of sheeting, the color of sheeting, the overlays, different things like that, it's all going to be on that."

Key steps include:

1. Material Selection: Choosing appropriate aluminum gauges for durability.
2. Shearing and Cutting: Large panels are cut to specified sizes, sometimes requiring segmentation into up to 14 panels for massive signs.
3. Sanding and Coating: Panels are smoothed and coated with green reflective sheeting using specialized machinery.
4. Letter Application: Each letter is individually printed and meticulously placed by hand, adhering to strict spacing and size specifications.

The entire fabrication of a single large highway guide sign can take up to 12 hours, underscoring the labor-intensive nature of the process.

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Economic Implications: Cost and Production Efficiency

High-quality highway signs entail significant costs. In North Carolina, the Department of Transportation (NCDOT) pays approximately $42 per square foot for the sign itself. Installation varies widely:

• Ground Mounted Signs: Approximately $1,400 to $8,500 depending on size.
• Overhead Signs: Costs can escalate to $200,000 for cantilever or spanning structures.

A notable economic advantage arises from the plant’s unique location within a prison, operated by Corrections Enterprises and staffed by incarcerated individuals. This arrangement allows for significantly reduced production costs:

Rene Roach [21:14]: "They can just really generate a lot of those signs really quickly for a fairly inexpensive price."

Moreover, NCDOT benefits from the plant’s efficiency, obtaining high-quality signs at lower prices, a model replicated in other states employing prison labor for similar manufacturing tasks.

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The Role of Prison Labor: A Cost-Effective Solution

The episode reveals that many of America’s highway signs are produced by incarcerated workers. Corrections Enterprises operates multiple plants across North Carolina, producing not only signs but also items like reading glasses, furniture, and license plates. This prison labor system contributes billions of dollars in goods annually, offering states a budgetary reprieve by leveraging low-cost labor.

Gene Hawkins touches on the rigorous demands of such work:

Gene Hawkins [21:59]: "The work's real tough, so you know, everybody will 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."

The economic model presents a double-edged sword: while it provides cost savings and efficient production for public entities, it raises ethical considerations regarding labor practices and compensation.

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Conclusion: The Hidden Economics of Signage

Episode 69 of The Economics of Everyday Things illuminates the complex interplay between manufacturing, standardization, and economics in the realm of highway signs. From historical chaos to modern precision, and from meticulous design to cost-effective production through prison labor, the episode underscores that even the most mundane everyday items embody intricate economic and operational frameworks.

Zachary Crockett wraps up with a teaser for the next episode:

"On next week's episode, we're going to look at that system, one that employs 800,000 people at wages of pennies per hour or even nothing at all."

This exploration invites listeners to appreciate the unseen structures and decisions shaping their daily commutes, highlighting the profound economics behind everyday conveniences.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Lee Blackman [01:54]: "This sign right here is 12 foot tall. This is going somewhere on Interstate 95 in North Carolina."
• Gene Hawkins [03:17]: "There was no coordinated effort to manage the movement of vehicles..."
• Lee Blackman [02:16]: "That's going to give you information about what road you're on right now..."
• Gene Hawkins [07:24]: "If you know what city name or street name you're looking for..."
• Rene Roach [21:14]: "They can just really generate a lot of those signs really quickly for a fairly inexpensive price."
• Gene Hawkins [21:59]: "The work's real tough, so you know, everybody will tell you that they wish they made more..."

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*For those interested in the economic mechanisms behind other everyday items, stay tuned for the upcoming episodes of The Economics of Everyday Things.

Transcript

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[Zachary Crockett]

The town of Bun, North Carolina, is easy to miss. It occupies a total area of just half a square mile, and it's home to fewer than 330 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 secure gates, is the state's primary manufacturer of highway signs. Inside the plant, workers are busy shearing giant aluminum panels, cutting sheets of green adhesive, and measuring out the spacing between letters. And outside in the shipping yard, the plant's general manager, Lee Blackman, is admiring a row of completed products.

[Lee Blackman]

This sign right here is 12 foot tall. This is going somewhere on Interstate 95 in North Carolina.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Lee Blackman]

That's going to give you information about what road you're on right now, the intersections that are coming up, what is the next town coming up, the exit, and so forth.

[Zachary Crockett]

Signs like this are all over American highways and freeways. There are literally millions of them, and they're 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 every highway sign, there's a long and winding road of economic decision making.

[Rene Roach]

We want to make sure that we get a good quality product because we want it out there for 20 years. We've got to be good stewards of.

[Zachary Crockett]

The taxpayers money for the Freakonomics radio network. This is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, highway signs. Back in the early days of the automobile, driving on American roadways was a free for all.

[Gene Hawkins]

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

[Zachary Crockett]

That's Gene Hawkins. He works for the forensic engineering firm Kittelson, and he's a professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas AM University. He's one of the foremost experts on the history, design and installation of traffic signs.

[Gene Hawkins]

The vehicles back 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

These informal networks of roads were a predecessor to the highway system in America. And along these roads there were very rudimentary ways of telling drivers where they were and what was up ahead. 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.

[Gene Hawkins]

I've seen pictures of stop signs that looked like coffins, signs with skull and crossbones on them.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Gene Hawkins]

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

[Zachary Crockett]

In the 1930s, these efforts culminated in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, or MUTCD for short. It provided a set of standards for traffic control devices across America's growing system of roads. Today, it's run by the Federal Highway Administration, and every state in the US adheres to its guidelines. It's nearly 1,200 pages long, and it lays out the ground rules for more than 500 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.

[Gene Hawkins]

The MUT CD gets into issues such as the design of the signs typically will give some indication on when or how to use the device.

[Zachary Crockett]

Technically, a highway sign refers to any type of sign that communicates something to drivers on the road. And the MUTCD breaks these signs down into three categories.

[Gene Hawkins]

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 our yellow diamond signs, which warn you of a potential hazard, like a curve in the road or a pedestrian crossing. And then there are guide signs which give directions.

[Zachary Crockett]

Guide signs are those enormous placards on the freeway that 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 font. Most signs use a special sans serif typeface that's unofficially called highway gothic. It's almost exclusively designed for highway signage.

[Gene Hawkins]

The spacing between the letters in the highway Alphabet is much greater than the spacing between letters on a printed page for reading.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Gene Hawkins]

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 mixed case, for example, my name Hawkins, the h sticks up and the k sticks up the word english. The e sticks up, the g descends, 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 further away than you can actually read the letters. And that was recognized as a real advantage when the traffic is moving at 70 miles an hour.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[Gene Hawkins]

If it's an overhead sign, it's 20 inches for a capital letter. So the letter is almost 2ft tall. And the general rule is the space between lines of text is going to be equal to the height of the line of text. So it's very easy to have a freeway sign that may only have three or four lines of copy that could end up being 10ft tall.

[Zachary Crockett]

Then there's the color of the sign. In the 1950s, the federal government looked into the legibility of black, blue, and green signs. Officials staged a test with hundreds of motorists on a road in New York and found that 58% of drivers preferred green. Turns out, the color green has another benefit, too. It provides the best base for retroreflectivity. Basically, what makes signs legible when they're illuminated by a car's headlights in the dark, the reflectivity of signs has come a long way. Engineers Initially used something called cat's eyes, tiny marbles embedded in each letter on the sign. These have since been replaced by reflective sheeting that covers the whole sign.

[Gene Hawkins]

Most of the sign sheeting made in the United States is what's called microprismatic sheeting. And essentially, if you look at a bicycle reflector, it looks like a series of ridges inside. And it is a similar structure in microprismatic sheeting is just really, really, really small.

[Zachary Crockett]

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 signs, and their purpose is to tell you what kinds of services and businesses are coming up. Say, a Chevron gas station in 2 miles or an Arby's at the next exit. These are actually ads, and businesses pay for the real estate.

[Gene Hawkins]

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 a bidding process that 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

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 Arizona, a placement can range from $1,100 in a less populated area to more than $6,000 in a busier urban location. In other states like North Carolina, it might only be a few hundred bucks. 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 an unusual labor pool. That's coming up.

[Gene Hawkins]

It's better over here.

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[Zachary Crockett]

It'S estimated that there are more than 40 million traffic signs on American roadways. There are dozens of companies that make the smaller ones like stop signs or speed limit signs, but few manufacturers are capable of producing the enormous green highway guide signs. When a state transportation department needs a new one, the job goes to someone like Rene Roach.

[Rene Roach]

I work for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. I am the state signing and delineation engineer.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Rene Roach]

We maintain over 80,000 miles in North Carolina. Any signs we lay out exactly where they need to go. What do they need to say? Destinations, route markers and things like that. Any of the pavement markings that are there on the road. We also place the size, the color, the location of those.

[Zachary Crockett]

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 12 to 20 years before the natural elements start to degrade it. But sometimes replacements happen far sooner.

[Rene Roach]

There is vandalism. You'd be surprised at how much vandalism they may get hit or destroyed. When a project comes through, maybe the destination needs to change on those.

[Zachary Crockett]

Whenever Roach needs a new highway sign, she turns to a trusted supplier.

[Rene Roach]

The vast majority of our signs are coming through Bunn in North Carolina.

[Zachary Crockett]

Nearly every highway sign in the state comes from the sign plant in the small town of Bunn. 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?

[Lee Blackman]

Yes, it is. It's pretty awesome. When we get out on the yard, I'll show you some really big signs.

[Zachary Crockett]

As a general manager who oversees the plant, Lee Blackman is in charge of running day to day operations. I talked to him on the factory floor over the sounds of welding torches and miter saws.

[Lee Blackman]

Our plant is actually divided into two different halves. This is what we call the project end, where we manufacture mostly your big overhead saw that you see there. The other end is what we call the maintenance sign of the plant. That's where your smaller signs, let's say your 30, 36 inch stop signs that you'd see in a rural setting. Your standard speed limit signs are back there.

[Zachary Crockett]

The process for making a highway sign begins with a detailed blueprint sent over by Renee Roach at the North Carolina Department of Transportation that's got the exact.

[Lee Blackman]

Specifications that DOT wants for this sign. Whether it's the type of sheeting, the color of sheeting, the overlays, different things like that, it's all going to be on that. So this routing sheet is going to follow this sign all through the process until the end.

[Zachary Crockett]

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

[Lee Blackman]

We use four different gauges or thicknesses of the metal. Our largest sheet that we'll use is 48 by 144, which is 4 foot wide, 12 foot long.

[Zachary Crockett]

The workers haul these huge sheets over to the shearing department where they're cut to size. Sometimes signs are so big that they have to be split up into as many as 14 different panels.

[Lee Blackman]

When the contractor gets it out on the job site, they don't put it together like a puzzle.

[Zachary Crockett]

The sheared metal is sanded down to get rid of any blemishes or rough patches. Then it's coated with green reflective sheeting.

[Lee Blackman]

There's no paint on the Side it's all sheeting and it's all translucent ink. This piece of equipment is called a squeeze roll applicator. The machine is set to a specific pressure and that will directly apply the sheeting to the piece of metal.

[Zachary Crockett]

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.

[Lee Blackman]

What he's doing now is he's pasting out the horizontal measurements for the line of copy. He knows how far from the bottom these letters are going to be, how far from the top, and he's setting all that up. He's going to hand lay every one of these letters individually. It tells you the exact distance from one letter to the next from the edge of the sign coming up to the first letter.

[Zachary Crockett]

So you know everything down to the spacing of the font.

[Lee Blackman]

You know the spacing, the different size fonts, and that determines too, you know, bigger sign, bigger font, smaller sign, smaller font. These letters can only be off an eighth of an inch.

[Zachary Crockett]

It's not a whole lot of leeway here.

[Lee Blackman]

It's not a whole lot of leeway.

[Zachary Crockett]

From start to finish, it can take around 12 hours to finish a single large highway guide sign. Once the sign is done, it's taken out into the storage yard there. Racks upon racks of enormous highway signs are lined up to get transported all over the state of North Carolina.

[Lee Blackman]

These signs right here are ready to go, whether it's going to a specific project on a specific road, or whether it's what we call a division where it's going to go to a specific dot division.

[Zachary Crockett]

Good highway signs don't come cheap. North Carolina's department of Transportation pays around $42 per square foot for the sign itself. Depending on the size, that could run anywhere from $1,400 for an exit sign up to $8,500 for a large guide sign. Then there's installation. If the sign is ground mounted labor and support beams might run an additional $18,000. If the sign has to hang over the road, either on a cantilever or a structure that spans the entire highway, that cost could be as high as $200,000. But in North Carolina, there's a catch that saves the state a ton of money. The bunn 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 Rene Roach to get a good deal on signs.

[Rene Roach]

They can just really generate a lot of those signs really quickly for a fairly inexpensive price.

[Zachary Crockett]

As it turns out, many of America's highway signs are produced by prisoners. And it's not just signs. Correction Enterprises has plants all over North Carolina that make reading glasses, furniture, canned 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's episode, we're going to look at that system, one that employs 800,000 people at wages of pennies per hour or even nothing at all.

[Gene Hawkins]

The work's real tough, so you know, everybody will 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.

[Zachary Crockett]

For the economics of everyday things, I'm Zachary Crack it. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.

[Gene Hawkins]

My father was a traffic engineer City of Houston.

[Zachary Crockett]

So you guys are Texas Traffic sign dynasty.

[Gene Hawkins]

I don't know if I'd call it a dynasty. If it had been a true dynasty, one of my kids would have followed in my footsteps. And that did not happen.

[Zachary Crockett]

The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side of Everything.

[Gene Hawkins]

Stitcher.

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