[Apologies for the short post today. It was a combination of not having any decent topics in mind, and something else that came up which killed all my motivation for the time being. More on that on Monday.]

As I’ve mentioned numerous times before, I make many observations while driving. A few months ago I carpooled with a friend. I probably annoyed him more than I realized (or intended to), as he later told me that I analyze traffic too much. I won’t deny it, but I also told him that if he thinks my traffic analysis was over the top, it’s a good thing he’s not privy to all the analysis I do while living the rest of my life.

More to the point, I recently took a business trip—too close to fly, but a very long drive. The thing I’ll be complaining about is something I’ve noticed this before, but this trip brought the observation to the forefront of my mind, and this time it stuck. Heading south, I came across multiple signs reading, Speed Limit is Enforced by Aircraft.

What a bizarre statement. First of all, the speed limit is obviously not enforced by aircraft. How would you even accomplish that? Short of landing a helicopter in front of the offending vehicle, there’s no way you could even pull off such a feat. Traffic speeds may be monitored by aircraft, but they are not in any way enforced by aircraft.

It’s bad enough that this ambiguity exists in someone’s head—that a person somewhere believes the speed limit really is somehow being moderated from above. But worse is that there exists, not just one, but multiple signs along the highway that say the same thing. You could argue it was just this state, but I’ve been all up and down the east coast of the US, and I’ve seen similar signs in multiple states.

Being somewhat familiar with bureaucratic inefficiencies, I believe I can say with assurance that more than one person reviewed the layout of these signs during the design process. I’ll even give states the benefit of the doubt here, and say that maybe there was a central office somewhere that wrote the road sign copy, and gave it to all the states to use as they saw fit. I’ll give them even further benefits of the doubt and say that even if Joe Blow on the manufacturing line was smart enough to point out the error, the very fact that the signs were already being manufactured is enough to say, “screw it. Keep the lines rolling.”

Regardless of the specific circumstances, what we do know is that there were clearly multiple people looking at this sign every step of the way. Multiple people. Theoretically educated. Working with taxpayer money. And this is what comes out? I’m almost too baffled to be angry.

It’s not like the sign is even ambiguously wrong! It’s a clearly incorrect use of the word enforced, and yet enough people were fine with that to push the entire thing through and post it on the road. I’m probably the only person to ever complain about this publically, but it seriously bugs me. It’s the little things like this that make me think, oh, man, we’re so screwed.

-Ted