Traffic signs get you back on the right road.

Traffic signs are sometimes my least favorite of all the signs that are out there.  When I’m driving, the only sign I don’t care for is the “Stop sign.”  Actually now that I think about it, I also don’t like the “No Parking sign,” or the “Tow away sign.”  The “Speed limit sign” gets on my nerves when people in front of my are driving below the speed limit, and the worst of all traffic signs while driving are the “Construction ahead” signs that say for the next 100 miles they will force 8 lanes of traffic down to 2 lanes.

I might swear and cuss at the traffic signs, but could you imagine our world without traffic laws and the traffic signs that remind us to obey them?  I know the lines at the DMV would be shorter, but every time you step out of the house and into a vehicle you’d be risking your life.  Traffic signs in many ways keep the order of the road and get people where they are going a little bit safer.

Your average Joe doesn’t order traffic signs or cares about them.  So why do I write an article about traffic signs?  Well I’ve been in the sign industry for over 10 years and I have never worked for the highway department or CalTrans or San Francisco, but one thing is for certain traffic signs are still being bought by general contractors and every day citizens every day.  They are just buying them for different reasons.

The General Contractor

The general contractor would care about traffic signs because there are some heavy duty machinery that needs to be moved in and out of the construction site so some times traffic needs to be diverted around where this move might take place.  I did small job for a general contractor a while back where the museum needed to close a section of a parking lot in order to do the work.  No less than a dozen different traffic signs were needed to divert the traffic coming from two different directions to make this happen.  This was a fairly small job in respect to building the new Bay Bridge, but the contractor could not just call CalTrans up and get these traffic signs put in.  They had to call a sign shop.

Parking Garages

The city of San Francisco is filled with parking garages and parking lots, then you think about the whole Bay Area and the millions of cars well were are all these cars going to park? Parking garages have a ton of need for traffic signs.  These signs have to keep the speed limit, tell people to yield, stop, and go.  You also have directional signs that tell people where they are or where they need to go to get out of the parking garage.  Some of these signs are traditional traffic signs, and some of the signs are designed custom to give you the feeling that you are not lost.  Parking garages take a lot of abuse too.  I don’t know why people do it, but signs get vandalized and torn down so there is a constant up keep needed on these signs.

Property Owner

If you are property owner or a building manager and the property has a drive way you will see a “No Parking sign” or a “Tow Away sign.”  I’ve lived in San Francisco since 1999 and I’ve been to so many friends homes where their drive way has been blocked by a car who just couldn’t find a parking spot so they used a drive way instead.  Angry phone calls are made and cars get towed as a result.  Proper signage posted on your garage or drive way can prevent most people from thinking about parking there, but there are a lot of violators of these signs out there…you know who you are!