“I pity the fool who doesn’t buckle up.”
“Calm down, Hulk. Leave the rage off the road.”
“Visiting in-laws? Slow down. Get there late.”
You may have noticed a lack of silly signs like these as you drive along I-15 in Utah.
Or maybe you haven’t noticed. The Utah Department of Transportation stopped displaying jokes on its electronic signs about four months ago, but spokesperson John Gleason says he hasn’t heard anyone say anything about it.
“I think people just got so used to seeing them that it may be a case where people don’t even notice that they’re not there anymore,” Gleason said.
Members of the Department of Transportation had been using humor to make their freeway signs more memorable for about seven years. They’ve thrown puns, pop culture references and allusions to upcoming holidays into reminders to buckle up, focus on the road and drive sober.
“Pledge allegiance to driving focused,” one sign said in July. “Keep Mom’s favorite safe. Buckle up,” another said around Mother’s Day.
“The intent was to create a conversation about safe driving behaviors and maybe bring a little levity to a very serious subject,” Gleason said. “And so that’s why we thought that if we could get people talking about it and thinking about it, that that would create action.”
In New Jersey, the Federal Highway Administration didn’t find efforts to spice up safety reminders funny or effective, per The Washington Post. There the agency saw the practice as distracting and hazardous and asked highway officials to stop.
Utah’s transportation department heard no such criticism. In fact, it received a slew of positive feedback.
“But like anything,” Gleason said, “when you’ve done it for a long period of time, people can get used to it and it just becomes something that people aren’t focusing on as much anymore.”
That’s why the department decided to take a break from creative road signs and shift its focus to other methods of promoting safe driving. For example, it recently invested $2.5 million in protection against wrong-way driving.
Wrong-way driving has been a dangerous problem on Utah roads, causing 127 crashes and 10 deaths last year. At the beginning of last year, the Utah Highway Patrol reported an 82% increase of wrong-way drivers.
This upsurge has led the Department of Transportation to start installing detection and warning systems in 20 different locations across the state.
“We’re always interested in innovative ways that are going to help us reach our goal of zero fatalities on our roads,” Gleason said.