It’s no joke. Humorous and quirky messages on electronic signs will soon disappear from highways and freeways across the country.
The U.S. Federal Highway Administration has given states two years to implement all the changes outlined in its new 1,100-page manual released last month, including rules that spells out how signs and other traffic control devices are regulated.
Administration officials said overhead electronic signs with obscure meanings, references to pop culture or those intended to be funny will be banned in 2026 because they can be misunderstood or distracting to drivers.
I could get behind that, but I was more pointing out the hypocrisy rather than endorsing billboards
I can see how someone whose first language isn’t English could have a hard time telling if an official sign is an important message or a humorous one. That’s not an issue for billboards because those never have important information.
This is exactly what it is. Nothing stopping these local highway patrol and safety departments from erecting electronic signs on the side of the highway for all their cute messages.
It’s that they’re using the big electronic ones that are overhead while driving which should be uniformly easy to understand, simple, and official.
Basically, if there’s a message on a sign above the actual road and it takes you more than a second to understand what it’s trying to say, it needs to be revamped.
It’s not hypocrisy because the signs they’re talking about are not in the same places as billboards. There are regulations about how far back billboards have to be. The signs in question here are the ones that are actually over the road or literally on the side of it, not 20 yards back.
And part of the reason that they don’t let billboards just hover literally over top of the roads is because they’re distracting. Signage that is on the road needs to have an official purpose and convey information that is relevant to the driver, and that information has to be delivered in a simple, uniform, and clear manner.