Politics & Government

O'Fallon Street Signs: Mismatched, Misspelled or an Example of Austerity?

If you point out a misspelling, the city is happy to fix it.

Last week, a Patch reader asked a question about O'Fallon's street signs on our message boards:

So what's the story with O'Fallon's street signs? I'm talking about the white signs with black lettering and the O'Fallon logo. Other cities that try to have a unified street sign look have nice looking signs. O'Fallon's signs have no consistency in size or font, and some have misspelled street names. I can probably find five different styles in my neighborhood alone.
Tom Drabelle, the city's communications director, has answered some of those questions for us.

Drabelle said that the city started replacing street signs several years ago. Before the project was done, the Department of Transportation changed its requirements.

"People may not know that the federal government has guidelines for street signs. For instance, at one point they required all capital letters, but that was changed," Drabelle said.

So, rather than go back to the beginning and starting over, the city just instituted the new requirements at that point. 

Drabelle said that the city did not want to use the taxpayers' money to replace signs that had just been changed.

People may also not know that the DOT has different requirements for subdivision streets, feeder streets and arterials. 

As far as misspellings, Drabelle said that he was not aware of any. "If anyone knows of one and lets us know, we'll get it fixed." 

The problem, he said, is that some of O'Fallon's streets have some rather unusual spellings. They might look wrong, but that is the way they were accepted into the city.

Have you seen a street sign that bothers you? Tell us in the comments!


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