Mental Floss

Why Many Road Signs Are No Longer Written in All Caps

There’s a reason you see fewer all-caps road signs these days. But there’s also a reason they haven’t disappeared completely.
ByEllen Gutoskey|
Road signs shout less than they used to.
Road signs shout less than they used to. | George Rose/GettyImages

If you’ve been living in the U.S. for at least 15 years, you’ve witnessed the slow fade of all-caps road signs whether or not you realized it. What once was “BROADWAY,” for example, is now “Broadway.” Since writing in all uppercase letters is about as close as we can get to shouting in print, it seems like a counterintuitive shift. In other words, wouldn’t an all-caps message grab our attention more effectively than a mostly lowercase one?

Sure, maybe in an email. But with road signs, the priority is to comprehend what you’re seeing from as far away as possible—and a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters is better at accomplishing that than all caps.

“When a word is spelled with all capital letters, it’s just a big rectangle from a long distance off,” Gene Hawkins, a traffic control expert and professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering at Texas A&M University, told WLRN in 2014. Mixed-case writing offers much more variation in letter shapes, so you can discern a word based on pattern alone. Consider the Hollywood of Hollywood Blvd.

“So, you know that from a distance there’s going to be a bump at the beginning, there’s going to be a smaller bump where the two l’s are and then the y is going to drop down below the base,” Hawkins explained. “And you can look for that pattern before you can actual{ly} read the word itself.”

street signs showing "BROADWAY" and "COLUMBUS AV" in all caps
The old kind of street signs in New York City. | Roberto Machado Noa/GettyImages

The Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) made the move toward mixed-case road signs in the 2009 edition of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices [PDF], which mandated that the “sign lettering for names of places, streets, and highways shall be composed of a combination of lower-case letters with initial upper-case letters.”

Why, then, are there still so many all-caps road signs? Two reasons: First, the FHWA still requires certain kinds of signage to be written in all caps. These include cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west), “distance or action messages” like “2 MILES” and “KEEP RIGHT,” and some other categories [PDF].

Second, according to Snopes, U.S. states only have to replace all-caps signs with mixed-case ones when they’d be replacing the signs anyway—due to regular wear and tear, for instance, or to comply with other specifications. So it’s possible that New York City still has a “BROADWAY” or two somewhere along the road.

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