The photo to your left is of a highway sign on Interstate 90 westbound, a few miles outside of Seattle. It’s a fine example of the comprehensive street-numbering system of King County, and also of the fussiness of too many road and highway signs.
The next exit gives access to three different roads, each of them numbered. The important bit of information is the numbers of the roads themselves; the rest is dross. Why on earth did the sign-makers clutter up this freeway sign with junk like “st” and “th” and the periods in “SE”? It just distracts from the essential information, making it harder to get the message across in those brief moments a driver has while zooming down the highway.
The right way to do this sign would have been:
161 Ave SE
156 Ave SE
150 Ave SE
In fact, given the way streets are designated in King County, you could have dispensed with “Ave” and just said “161 SE” etc. But that might have offended the sensibilities of local drivers, who expect a little more deference to tradition. But the ordinal-number designations, and the utterly useless punctuation, are offenses against function and common sense.
I won’t comment on the oddness of a road system that has all three of these local streets coming off one freeway exit. That’s a problem for highway engineers, not signage designers.
The New York City subway goes even further, shortening “Avenue” to just “Av”.
Agreed. That local convention is opaque to visitors, so I wouldn’t really drop the “Ave” either. Just the clutter.
The other thing that saves lives is clear road markings. The Seattle region is notable for the number of highways where the white and yellow lines that indicate lanes have been allowed to fade into ghostly images. And that’s in broad daylight; on a drizzly, foggy night they become utterly invisible. The stretch of I-90 where I took that snapshot is a good bad example.
You said it! I can see a bumper sticker (in an easily-readable typeface, of course) “Clean Signage Saves Lives” in consideration of the vehicles that drift out of their lanes as their drivers struggle to make sense of the clutter above.
However, I wouldn’t eliminate the “Ave” in a metropolis in which avenues go north-south and streets go east-west and can therefore designate widely disparate corners of the universe. Yes, I know the directional comes before streets and after avenues, i.e. “SE 161st Street” vs. “161st Avenue SE,” but I maintain that road signs are primarily for people not already familiar with the territory and to whom the peculiarities of King County addressing conventions might still be unknown.