The Journal Record
By Brian Brus
Oklahoma City reporter - Contact: brian.brus@journalrecord.com
Posted: 07:40 PM Friday, September 16, 2011
OKLAHOMA CITY – Oklahoma’s smaller communities are breathing a sigh of relief after the federal government yielded recently to concerns about new street signs mandates, while larger cities are already working to merge requirements into their budgets.
“A lot of the smaller cities, like Del City, just didn’t even have an inventory (accounting) of their signs, much less the funding to replace them,” said Jerry Church, spokesman for the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments.
“I hate to use the term ‘unfunded mandate.’ It was a policy with great intentions, but I don’t think they realized at the local level that some of the smaller governments were unprepared,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has been moving toward enacting signage safety standards initiated under the Bush administration, changes to uniform traffic controls that include traffic sign reflectivity and street name sign readability consistency. The department originally wanted all stop signs, one-way signs, speed-limit signs and other warning signs to meet higher “retro-reflectivity” standards, for example, to make them easier to read at night.
The department has been calling for those changes to be in place throughout the country by 2015, and for street name signs to be replaced by 2017. But many cities complained that replacing signs would be painfully expensive during a recession, especially when other infrastructure projects were already being put on hold. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials expressed similar concerns... FULL ARTICLE
Posted on
Fri, September 16, 2011
by John Cox