I-90 Smart Road - thoughts? (Barrington, Vienna: buses, safety, moving)

[MillennialUrbanist]

For clarify's sake, "I-90 Smart Road" refers to this: https://www.illinoistollway.com/docu...7-ecbb98a241c8.

If you drove on I-90 anywhere between I-294 and Barrington Rd. over the last year, I'm sure you saw those odd-looking TV screens mounted over the expressway. According to the Illinois Tollway Authority, they're for showing lane safety information. Like, which lanes are OK to drive in, and which ones are not, represented by different illuminated symbols.

I drive on I-90 often enough to see those things in action. But pretty much 95% of the time, the screens are dark. Except for red X's over the shoulders, and the big information screens on the right, which showed the same text every time I saw it. Unless it's meant to be an emergency alert system of sorts, it almost feels like underutilized potential or wasted money, to invest into building those screens and disrupt traffic in the process, only to have them stay dark most of the time. Then again, we already have an emergency alert system, with those large screens showing plain text in amber-on-black. In which case, "Do not drive on shoulder" and "Shoulder use by Pace buses only" signs would be heck of a lot cheaper. But I'm not a traffic engineer, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Also don't forget: this is Illinois we're dealing with.

What does everyone else think?

[KerrTown]

I find the MUTCD signs too word dependent. I think the nativist English-only current in the U.S. within the past decade has spurred replacement of symbolic signs (from my vantage point here in Coastal Texas). The dual language issue in Canada spurred reforms to symbolic signage in the 1980's, away from the MUTCD model. I prefer the Vienna signage as it is symbol based from inception.

It is getting hard to read signs going x-MPH with varying letter and word spacing to accommodate length. One example is are the yellow merge signs. The symbols are much faster to mentally process than the words.

[MillennialUrbanist]

The Smart Road signals on I-90 don't really use words. Even the yellow "caution" and "merge" signals, with words on them, are distinguished by the arrow shape: straight down for "caution" (same shape as the green arrow), and diagonal for "merge". They do look similar to lane signals on European highways, so maybe some influence/inspiration is there.

Even with what you said, I don't see North America moving away from the MUTCD standard, despite having adopted a subset of Vienna signs (like "no right/left turn"). It's too entrenched into everyday logistics, like the British units. So changing it will be a messy process. By the way, modified MUTCD is used in Australia and New Zealand.

[pvande55]

It will also be used for bus on shoulder operations, where it would say "Shoulder-Bus Only." In the case of a crash in the left lane, it would direct every one to the right. There are many uses, some of which are yet unknown.