States have had their fun with highway safety messages, posting everything from Taylor Swift lyrics to discourage texting in Mississippi, to a “vibe check” — winking at Gen Z — to encourage seat belt use in Arizona.
Such messages are shown intermittently on thousands of highway signs, known as variable messaging signs, when the billboards aren’t lit up with alerts about accidents, construction or other real-time traffic issues.
As the summer vacation season gets going, millions of America’s interstate drivers can expect to find more puns, silly turns of phrase or cultural references on those massive missives.
But federal safety officials aren’t amused by states’ cheek. In recent years, they’ve begun to discourage what they view as overly creative messages, fearing that in trying to entertain drivers, highway officials are confusing rather than enlightening them. Some states, most recently Arizona and New Jersey, have pushed back. As a result, officials at the Federal Highway Administration clarified this year that they’re not banning road-sign humor outright.
Mississippi, the state with the highest motor vehicle fatality rate in the country last year, has been particularly creative. Recent messages have included “FOUR I’S IN MISSISSIPPI TWO EYES ON THE ROAD,” and a reference to the Taylor Swift song “Anti-Hero”: “TEXTING AND DRIVING? SAY IT: I’M THE PROBLEM IT’S ME.”
“It’s been an effective program for us. We haven’t been contacted by [the] federal highway department and told to cease and desist. We want to be in compliance, but we haven’t stopped our message program,” said Paul Katool, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Transportation.
A new rulebook issued last year “does not prohibit messages from including humor or cultural references,” Federal Highway Administration chief Shailen Bhatt wrote in a recent letter to U.S. Reps. Greg Stanton, an Arizona Democrat, and Thomas Kean Jr., a New Jersey Republican.
The representatives had complained earlier this year that the agency was stifling state creativity, calling the new rules “a blanket discouragement of humorous signs that leaves no room for state-by-state discretion.”
“Both of these states have signs that use slang or popular language, but the messages are clear,” the representatives wrote in their letter to Bhatt.
They cited messages such as two Arizona contest winners, “SEATBELTS ALWAYS PASS THE VIBE CHECK” and “I’M JUST A SIGN ASKING DRIVERS TO USE TURN SIGNALS,” as well as New Jersey’s recent holiday messages: “ DON’T BE A GRINCH, LET THEM MERGE” and “ SANTA’S WATCHING, PUT DOWN THE PHONE.”
Bhatt’s response is an apparent softening of the FHWA’s opposition to the signs, after the agency asked New Jersey to pull down some messages in 2022. Some became so popular on social media that the state Department of Transportation asked drivers not to take photos of the signs while driving, posting a cat meme on its own social media accounts: “IF YOU KEEP TAKING PHOTOS OF THE VMS BOARDS WHILE DRIVING WE WILL TURN THIS CAR AROUND AND GO BACK TO THE OLD MESSAGES.”
Messages shown in 2022 included “GET …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
