Gene Hawkins
speaker
12 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Gene Hawkins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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 vehicles back then would not be used to travel long distances anyway. As the ability to travel longer distances increased, they created these trail systems, which were typically run by trail associations.
I've seen pictures of stop signs that looked like coffins, signs with skull and crossbones on them.
The State Highway Department people recognized we need to do a better job of providing a consistent, uniform system of traffic control devices.
The MUTCD gets into issues such as the design of the signs. Typically, we'll give some indication on when or how to use the device.
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 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.
The spacing between the letters in the highway alphabet is much greater than the spacing between letters on a printed page for reading.
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.
If it's an overhead sign, it's 20 inches for a capital letter. So the letter is almost two feet tall. 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 10 feet tall.
Most of the sign sheeting made in the United States is what's called microprismatic sheeting. 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, just really, really, really small.
In most states, 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.
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