#HTE

Today’s Urban Design Observation: Improvised Road Signage Ballast

These are the signs that road crews use in NYC. You don’t want a texting driver slamming into a bunch of repairmen, and the bright orange color of these, topped with flags and fronted with cones that have reflective tape on them, fulfill their function of being highly visible.

These are lightweight and designed to break down nearly flat. You can see here that the flag supports are held in place by simple Velcro straps and can all be folded in for transport.

One area where the designers fell short is in accounting for wind. To keep the sign from toppling over in a gust, the crew has thrown a bag of Quikrete over the legs. They either had these in the truck or bought it at the hardware store down the street, my guess being that it’s the cheapest heavy thing they could buy.

I knew that bag wouldn’t last in the rain, though. The next day I came by to see if it was still there. It wasn’t.

Instead they’d replaced it with paving stones.

If you were the designer of this object, what would you do differently?

Even if this thing came with a sandbag, it would be easy enough for it to become separated from the unit in transportation or storage. I’d like to see how these things are stored at the depot or wherever. If we had that information we might be able to design a better way to keep this unit together with a ballast, in such a way that they’re unlikely to become separated.