Super-Sized Street Signs
Photo by Kate McDonnell
A few years ago, the City of Montreal installed a new set of street signs at the corner of University Street and René Lévesque Boulevard, in the heart of the business district, kitty-corner to Place Ville Marie. They’re part of a pilot project that will eventually determine the appearance of signs at major intersections across the city. Unlike other Montreal street signs, of which the most recent design dates to 1987, these new signs are displayed more prominently and they are extremely large: obviously designed to be visible to motorists travelling at high speeds.
There are actually two different types of signs on display at University and René Lévesque. Both feature capitalized text in the Univers typeface and both have relegated the city’s flower logo to a small panel above the sign itself. The difference is that one type of sign is white with black text; the other is green with white text, a colour scheme common to many North American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago. Personally, I dislike the green signs, simply because they symbolize the kind of car-dominant vision that sees city streets in the same light as interstate highways.
Other people seem to disagree with me, according to Sylvie Tremblay, a conseillère en aménagement urbain with the city. “Opinion is very mixed,” she told me. “There’s no consensus. Some people like the green, others the white.” Still more have suggested a blue background, but Tremblay said this might cause confusion with tourist information signs, which are also blue.
What worries some isn’t the colour of the signs, however, but their size. You could say that they’re super-sized signs for a super-sized intersection: thanks to 1960s urban planners, René Lévesque is by far downtown’s widest street, a fast-flowing river of traffic that becomes especially fearsome where it joins University, another major street that funnels expressway traffic into downtown. Even if the new signs work at this corner, they might not elsewhere in the city, especially at busy but more intimately-scaled intersections like St. Denis and Mount Royal. Dinu Bumbaru, the policy director of Heritage Montreal, worried that the new signs would overwhelm pedestrians. “They’re just too big,” he said last month. “We want to find a way not to make drivers dangerous people by look around to find the street name, but at the same time, you don’t want to create an oppressive car-driven environment.”
For the moment, according to Tremblay, the pilot project is still underway and the city isn’t interested in replacing many street signs anyway. That said, I did notice that the newly defused Town of Mount Royal has mounted the green version of the pilot project signs on some of its major arteries—minus, of course, the Montreal flower logo. Let’s hope this doesn’t become a trend.
Montreal Apartments
aj says:
I posted on Kate’s Flickr photo: I think the difference in colour between the signs is to differentiate between two-way arteries like Rene-Levesque, and one-ways like University.
Also, the font isn’t Univers, it’s a much newer one that resembles FF Transit (designed for European airports), but I haven’t been able to pin it down exactly.
Of course as a typographer, I can say that it’s much easier to read lowercase letters than it is to read all-caps; if readability’s the issue I would have chosen all-lowercase Helvetica Bold ;)
May 10th, 2007 at 12:32 am
Christopher DeWolf says:
No, the green is definitely an alternative to the white. Tremblay explained as much: she said that the whole point of the pilot project was to determine which colour scheme is more effective. Besides, University is a two-way street below R-L.
Also, thanks for pointing out that the typeface isn’t Univers.
May 10th, 2007 at 3:41 pm