Signs 'O the times

By Anna Mitchell  

FEBRUARY 24, 2010 9:17 a.m. (0)

Traffic signs don’t do anyone much good if they aren’t visible at night.

Although a quarter of accidents happen at night, the Federal Highway Administration reports, half of fatalities occur during those hours – making visibility an apparent link to the most serious accidents.

Mike Garrett isn’t sure how many signs his public works department is responsible for in Spartanburg County, but he does know it’s in the thousands.

By the end of next year, he will need a plan in place for replacing all of them.

“This is what we call an unfunded mandate,” said Garrett, direct of public works for the county. “It’s a requirement we upgrade all our signs to meet new reflectivity standards.”

Across the nation, municipal, county and state transportation divisions are grappling with a federal mandate aimed at making the roads safer – albeit for a price. To soften the blow on these easier-to-see but expensive signs, the mandate finalized in early 2008 gave governments until 2015 to replace noncompliant warning and regulatory road signs.

They have until January 2011 to pitch a plan on how they intend to accomplish it.

Garrett has asked his county government for an extra $140,000 this coming budget year starting July 1 to pay for the software, equipment and personnel he will need to run around Spartanburg County cataloguing and testing signs too difficult to see at night. His budget last year for replacing signs was $60,000; he has budgeted $940,000 over five years to replace the delinquent signs, with the biggest expense -- $300,000 – coming in the 2014-15 budget year.

The chief supplier of the reflective sign material is 3M, Garrett said.

Spartanburg County’s public works department installs and maintains all the stop signs at intersections on state highways; it also does traffic safety signs on county roads and every street-name sign in the county except in the city of Spartanburg.

The Federal Highway Administration has launched a Web site – minimumreflectivity.org – to guide governments on the requirements and their benefits to safety and finances.

The nation’s aging motorist population is a concern, the agency reported, with the reduced eyesight and reaction times that comes with age. Meanwhile, poor signage leaves departments vulnerable to litigation, and the loss in terms of wages to individual families when a loved one is injured or killed is measured in millions of dollars.

Greenville County spokesman Bob Mihalic said the public works department there is also aware of the federal mandate but less worried about the up-front costs.

“Where we are is most if not almost all, or the strong majority, of our county signs already have high-intensity sheeting on them,” Mihalic said.

Greenville County personnel will be attending training in coming weeks on how to operate a device to determine the reflectivity of signs – just to make sure they are in compliance.

“Right now we are confident ours are good signs,” he said. “Ironically, the issue now is getting the equipment to test them for 2012. We would rather spend money on the signs.

Comments

Add New

Leave a Comment
Comments are moderated and may not be posted immediately.
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Title:
	Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."