Arizona drivers used to chuckling at quirky safety messages might soon find their commutes less amusing. The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has mandated that the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) and other states ditch the humorous signs after concerns they could potentially distract drivers or be misunderstood. According to azfamily.com, signs like “Don’t hurry, be happy” and “Merge real smooth” have a two-year expiration date as per the new guidelines.
The FHWA's updated manual specifies that signs "should not be used to display a traffic safety campaign message if doing so could adversely affect respect for the sign," and pointed out that messages with obscure or secondary meanings might require drivers to unnecessarily spend more time to process. This comes despite ADOT's seven-year tradition of crowdsourcing witty signage through a popular contest that last year drew 3,700 entries, as reported by fronterasdesk.org.
Some Arizona officials are not on board with this federal intervention. "The humor part of it, we kinda like, I think in Arizona the majority of us do, if not all of us. So we don’t understand why are you trying to have the federal government come in and tell us what we can do in our own state," Rep. David Cook, a Republican from Globe, told azfamily.com in a statement.
Despite the pushback, ADOT is now required by the federal directive to begin phasing out the amusing signs. A bill aimed to limit highway sign messaging fizzled last session when Gov. Katie Hobbs vetoed it, Republican state lawmaker Neal Carter, noted, "It is not the intent to change that kind of messaging or to specify how they make the messaging, whether it’s humorous or not," in a hearing covered by fronterasdesk.org. ADOT has not publicly shared its next steps, with a spokesperson stating the agency is "in the process of reviewing" the new manual.
