Zachary Crockett
speaker
79 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Zachary Crockett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The town of Bunn, 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.
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.
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.
For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, highway science. Back in the early days of the automobile, driving on American roadways was a free-for-all.
That's Gene Hawkins. He works for the forensic engineering firm Kittleson, and he's a professor emeritus in the Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University. He's one of the foremost experts on the history, design, and installation of traffic signs.
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.
As people started driving further and crossing state lines, they didn't know how to interpret all the markers they saw.
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 U.S. 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.
Technically, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 retro-reflectivity, 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.
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 two miles or an Arby's at the next exit. These are actually ads, and businesses pay for the real estate.
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.
Showing 1–20 of 79 · page 1 of 4
Next →