I’ll never forget trying to help an old man and his wife try to find his way out of Richmond. He was heading north but had taken a wrong turn and ended up in a residential neighborhood. I explained how to get back on the Interstate, but I could tell he wasn’t absorbing my instructions. I was heading in the general direction of where he needed to go, so I offered to show him. Hopping in my car, I guided the old man onto the Powhite Parkway and then, when Interstate 95 North veered off to the right, pointed vigorously to the exit as I continued on my way.
Oooh. Tough luck. He got confused and took the I-95 South exit instead. As he sank into the distance in my rear-view mirror, I wonderered how long it took for the old guy — Petersburg, maybe? — to figure out he was heading in the wrong direction.
The moral of the story is that road markings — even roads as big as Interstates — can be confusing to people who aren’t intimately familiar with them. People take wrong turns, get disoriented and sometimes end up having accidents. Wrecks are bad in and of themselves — people get injured, even killed. Wrecks also tie up traffic, often causing back-ups and aggravating congestion. Anything we can do to reduce the incidence of automobile accidents is a good thing.
According to Tom Holden at the Virginian-Pilot, the Virginia Department of Transportation is using more reflective sign materials, putting bigger typefaces on signs and painting bolder highway markings to help make driving a little easier. Along some sections of interstates, VDOT is painting interstate shields directly onto the pavement so that drivers are clear about what road they’re on.
The changes should be helpful to motorists with poor eyesight and slow reaction times, a number that grows as the population ages. Better interstate signs certainly would have helped the old guy I tried to assist. The measure may be modest but it’s also relatively inexpensive. VDOT should be commended for a small but welcome change.
(Better signs and markings, incidentally, were on the list of reforms recommended last year by former VDOT Commissioner Philip Shucet shortly after leaving the post. They join the list of ideas on that list — outsourcing maintenance, soliciting design-build contracts, and creating access-management plans for road corridors — that have been implemented to a greater or lesser degree since then.)