Rhode Island town ready to keep hundreds of "undocumented stop signs"

Some anonymous guerrilla urban planner has planted nearly 600 "undocumented stop signs" in the town of Cranston, RI. A special town government committee has elected to keep all but 21 stop signs and 2 yield signs -- apparently, the unknown freelancer put her or his stop signs in places that really needed them. The town council still needs to approve the committee's findings.

A similar ordinance was proposed last June, but the city council rejected it 5-4, with the majority saying it was not willing to authorize the signs in bulk without gathering further information. Three city workers were then assigned to drive around and look at 2,595 signs and checking each one against a map to determine which were the 1,903 that had been officially approved. The mayor's office presented its report in November. Assuming the three sign-checkers started this project in July and finished at the end of October, that's about seven signs per day per person. It's tempting to say that this is not a very impressive rate, but I imagine they were all going a little crazy by sign number two-thousand...
A city official said they believed that the mystery signs had been put up by "housing developments over the years" that had not followed the right protocol to codify the signs. Translation: they have no idea. I prefer to think that they all just appeared one night, like crop circles, and so that's the explanation I'm going with.

UPDATE: City to Legitimize Mystery Stop Signs, Report Says

(Image: Stop Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 54409200@N04's photostream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Action • News

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

BookGuy

Reminds me of this traffic sign art around a PennDOT storage facility in Western PA:

http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/read-between-the-signs-unique-recycled-road-signs-mural.html
- Pantograph
  
  Thank you for blowing my mind.
- mccrum
  
  Well, I guess I’m taking a road trip.
Tgg161

Reminds me of the guy that made his own freeway sign: http://ankrom.org/freeway_signs.html
Nadreck

I wonder how this would work out with bus stops? I remember how, when I was doing a job for the Pittsburgh mass transit company, it turned out that the official route maps only bore a passing resemblance to where the buses actually stopped and where the bus stop signs were. This was know to all the operations people but none of the planners. Bit of a nuisance as we were putting the routes and schedules on-line.

This is often the case with computerisation projects: now that all of an organisation’s data has to be in one place and be consistent all sorts of information hoards have to be expropriated. Then the political circus of making the merged hoards consistent begins. All of this is, of course, blamed on the consultants hired to put in the computer and they’re expected to be the referees (for free, of course) as no one wants to make decisions unpopular with any of the people they have to work with. The consultants will be pissing off after the current job so are thought not to have that restriction plus you can blame them after they’re gone if anything doesn’t work out. The latter is harder to do if the decision is made by someone who’s around to defend themselves.
Lobster

God damned “undocumented” stop signs, taking jobs away from honest American stop signs! At least they’re in English!
- Boba Fett Diop
  
  Hee, hee…now I want to start sneaking “ArrÃªte” signs down to RI from Quebec.
MarkM

This isn’t really newsworthy.
The non-headline is:
“Small town doesn’t keep track of its paperwork.”
Anonymous

That would be some serious $$$ for just a ‘vigilante’
A 36″ Stop sign cost around $300 to put in the ground. Thats sign+hardware+pole+labor. Take out the labor and your still looking at a couple of hundred dollars.
So we say that the signs are at least $200 each (on the cheep side), times that by 600 and your ‘vigilante’ has dropped at least $120,000.
TooGoodToCheck

I’m hoping for a Batman-esque vigilante, perhaps named “The Stopper”, who after suffering an uncontrolled intersection tragedy now prowls the streets at night, armed only with official looking signage, and a mission.
- ultranaut
  
  Vigilante?! The Stopper is a founding member of the shadowy global terrorist movement known as TRAFFIC-KONTROL. I’ve heard they are working on some kind of a doomsday device that can transform any intersection into a fucking round-a-bout! Imagine the chaos and increased fuel efficiency that will ensue if no one has to stop for lights again, it is terrifying!
  - Hank
    
    Shouldn’t that be Traphik-Kontrol?
Niklas

Whoever wrote that does not work like a normal person.

2595 signs divided on 3 persons is 865 signs per person.

123 days (all July through October) work without accounting for weekends, vacations or sick days gives about 7 signs per day. But nobody works on weekends.

Assuming people actually do not work on weekends (let us say an average 8 weekend days per months) we get 91 work days which gives 9.5 signs per day or one sign every 51 minutes assuming 8-hour work days on average.

That is if they do absolutely nothing else during their work, like having a few days off, helping with more pressing matters or running multiple projects at the same time it might look like a little slow, but they also have to document what they are doing, write a report, check their data and so on.

Also, Ambiguity is absolutely correct.
Mitch_M

I’ve been wanting to put up some “PHOTO RADAR AHEAD” signs in problem speeding areas. Photo radar is illegal in Wisconsin but only a few people need to believe the signs to slow the other traffic down.
retchdog

an interesting counterpoint to this (recently featured on boingboing) article: http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/02/03/964781/citizen-activist-grates-on-state.html
Anonymous

Sorry, but it’s probably the mundane answer: signs put up by developers without getting them authorized. It was common knowledge when I was young that many TOWNS had put up speed limit signs without getting the proper approvals. If you got a ticket you’d go to Rutgers Law Library, research if the DOT had legalized the sign, and if it hadn’t the speed limit was the county limit, not the posted one. Often a 20 MPH difference.
- chgoliz
  
  Is that still true?
Wally Ballou

Sad thing is, almost no one EVER stops…like actually STOPS at a stop sign anymore.
When you put a stop sign in a location where there is never any cross traffic to speak of (in other words it’s been placed there because the people who live on that street want to discourage through traffic), then roll-throughs are inevitable.
Underpants Gnome

At the roughly $700 some cities charge to replace a stop sign (it happened to a friend of mine, I swear!), someone’s spending a lot of money.

At least its only stop signs they’re putting up, and not those phony “15 minute parking” or “parking by permit only” signs you see everywhere around Chicago.
- Ubernostrom
  
  Stop signs themselves rarely cost more than 100 bucks. The other 600 is probably labor and penalties, for what I’m assuming was the destruction of the original that your friend had to pay for.
bcsizemo

Hey I do the “California Stop” all the time. I look both ways and make sure it’s safe to proceed, but why do I need to come to a COMPLETE stop if no one is there? Besides wearing a little more on the brakes, wearing out my clutch faster, and using more gas it’s not needed just because it’s the law.

Common sense sometimes isn’t so common.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  At this point, I would be satisfied if people, especially the police, would roll through the stop sign at my corner. Saturday, while it was snowing 7 inches in a matter of 4 hours, I watched an asshat blow through the intersection going at least 30 mph – the posted speed is 25 mph. The police, city and county, blast through the intersection at speeds upward of 60 mph, often with nothing more then their flashing lights as a warning.
  
  Tell me no one is ever going to get killed trying to walk across that intersection to the park on the other side.
- skeletoncityrepeater
  
  People have trouble getting below 5 MPH which would be plenty to see what’s going on and move forward, but people (I’m in LA personally) will just roll through at 10 or 15.. It’s really dangerous. It’s best just to come to a complete stop because people are idiots and you have to make the law for the lowest common denominator. Maybe you are being safe with your low-speed roll at a stop sign, but other people might not have that common sense. Without a standard (actually stopping) everyone keeps pushing the limit and making an acceptable ‘roll’ faster and faster. Just stop all the way.
  - Anonymous
    
    Yes, you’ve nailed it. My house is on the corner of a four-way stop, and I’ve lived here for 8 years. My office window looks out on the intersection, so I’ve become something of a student of stop sign psychology. The California Roll leads to the California Yield, then the California Merge, then the California Fuck It I’m Important And In A Hurry. In that final stage, people courteously slow from 45 to 25 as they blow through. The speed limit is 20, for what that’s worth. Then the cops get wind of it, set up camp behind my neighbour’s bushes, cash in for a couple of days, and the cycle resets. Those are good days, and it’s a riot to watch.
    
    Also, for those of you who mentioned the Netherlands study (the book Traffic mentions it), their results were interesting, but have there been further studies of the long term effects? My impression upon reading it was that it would work until people got used to it, like when you first move to a dense city. At first you drive slow because of the sensory overload, but after a couple of months it’s old hat and you’re back to speeding.
- penguinchris
  
  I’m not sure which came first, the sushi or the stop-sign-behavior, but I believe the better term is “California Roll” :)
  
  BTW when I lived in SoCal for two years, my driving habits changed considerably. I’d always been a stop sign roller, but definitely got worse in CA. Now I’m back in NY, and I still prefer to drive as if I were in CA. It seems better all around, including safety-wise (it’s not just rolling through stop signs).
  
  The only negative thing I picked up is not using turn signals. I used to be anal about that before living in CA, not sure what happened there. But, I do use them when their intended purpose – to signal other drivers – is necessary. It isn’t always, even if other drivers can see you, which is what leads to laziness about it.
Anonymous

is Mayor West to blame?
Anonymous

I’m from Rhode Island, and I’ve got a friend who lives in a neighborhood with a bunch of “undocumented” stop signs. One week they weren’t there, the next.. poof. Suddenly there were stop signs all over the place.

Rhode Island’s full of terrible drivers (some of the worst in the country, according to statistics) so it doesn’t really make a lick of difference.

I’ve since moved away from RI, but it’s amusing to see some kind of ‘closure’ about those mysterious stop signs.
legotech

I knew a cop who got called on the carpet for not writing enough tickets, so he went to the city yard, grabbed a stop sign and put it up on a corner under a nice tree and sat there all day writing warnings. Next time the city went around fixing signs, they planted it in concrete. Was like 20 years ago, the city maintains and replaces it now and again.

We used to laugh every time we drove by it.
Ambiguity

…apparently, the unknown freelancer put her or his stop signs in places that really needed them…

The problem with “common sense” is that it is often just plain wrong, and I doubt these governing bodies would have any idea what evidence-based policy would even look like.

Extensive research — actually looking at the data — conducted in the Netherlands has cast some serious doubts on “common sense” when it comes to traffic safety — e.g., that widening roads and increasing signage makes things safer. This research has caused many roads to be narrowed and signs to be removed, making people drive more slowly and actually pay attention. And traffic safety has increased, accordingly.

Of course, evidence and data rarely matter to policy makers. Facts just get in the way of ideologies.

I’ve fought these battles in the county I live in, to no avail. A road is said to be too narrow and dangerous, so they widen it. And yes, accidents and fatalities go up, so they just widen it more. Stupid, stupid…

I have no idea if these traffic signs are in places that they are needed, but the point I’m making is that I doubt the sign vigilante does either.
- Emo Pinata
  
  I rather like the current approach of just requiring cars to be safer without changing much of anything else.
webmonkees

I’m somehow reminded of Maurice from Northern Exposure opinion that the installation of a stop sign would lead to civilization creeping into the Alaskan wilderness.
quori

It was not a freelancer per say…. The majority of the various additional signs were put in place by the RI DOT. The state had determined the additional signage was necessary, but the town had not provided its approval.

As a result the signs were put in place and left there, until someone realized all the t/i’s were not crossed and dotted properly.

Sad thing is, almost no one EVER stops…like actually STOPS at a stop sign anymore. Everyone slowly rolls up to them and then guns it. or they stop behind someone in front of them and then careen forward as if to say, “HEY! I stopped behind them…see I stopped!”
Anonymous

What a waste of fuel! California stops save energy, it’s just progressive green. Someone please post some links to studies that show stop signs waste gas and worsen air pollution around the stops.