ENVIRONMENT

Passage of a city ordinance regulating commercial signage in Dallas last year was hailed as a first-time-ever, landmark event in urban ecology. The simple object of the ordinance’s drafters was to prevent the malignant growth of what Lee Clark charmingly refers to as “Lemmon Av-enue-itis.” And the ordinance does seem to have enough teeth to restrain the competitive exuberance of private enterprise’s attempts to hawk its wares to the public.

But it may prove to be a mixed blessing. In retrospect, it is now clear the drafters of the ordinance overreacted. In their drive to correct the visual scandals along Dallas’ major thoroughfares, they bring to mind the citizens described by Alvin Eisen-man, professor of graphic design at Yale University, when he wrote of “garden club persons who hope to suppress every trace of commercialism everywhere by writing strict anti-sign zoning codes. In their view, commerce is a kind of social disease to be concealed as much as possible from public view, like a drunken uncle.”

Despite the hours and hours of research and debate preceding the ordinance’s successful enactment, no one seems to have given much thought to the long-run effects. Those effects may prove to be the consummate irony: The new ordinance may well lead to a proliferation of signs in Dallas.

The objective, you’ll recall, was to impose controls on all commercial signs in the city. On-street traffic signs were excepted from the new rules for the simple, logical reason that traffic signs must scream their directions to the innocent driver as a matter of prudent public safety. The size of a traffic sign, and the lettering on it, must be based on the reading distance to be accommodated, the anticipated speed of traffic, and the anticipated reaction time required for the driver to see the sign, perceive it, and take appropriate action (slow down, brake, stop, turn, or whatever). Not one factor in this delicate equation is negotiable: Each is fixed by laws of physics, the behavioral patterns of human creatures, and the capabilities and limitations of human perception.

So, the proponents of the ordinance took note of these needs and made a general exception for official signs posted on public streets. Fine. But then the proponents went on to limit commercial signs on a mistaken assumption which could ultimately prove disastrous to public safety. For some reason, the proponents assumed that all commercial signs are per se advertisements. They are not. Just as official traffic signs on public streets pass on vital information, so do commercial traffic signs on privately-controlled streets. The next time you take a turn in the NorthPark parking lot and see a sign that warns “Keep Right,” you’d better follow the instruction; otherwise, you’ll run headlong into an oncoming car. That sign, by the way, is now regarded as a commercial sign, and it falls under the strict provisions of the new code.

So watch out. Under the new sign standards, any given premise is allotted a “budget” of one detached sign larger than two square feet per each 450 feet of frontage or fraction thereof. For example, a frontage of 449 feet can have one such sign; one of 451 feet can have two, and one of 901 feet can have three. The largest allowable sign not counted against this budget is two square feet or smaller. This is an area less than 17 by 17 inches or about one and a half times as large as this open copy of D. The code allows no exceptions on the matter of sign size.

The nature of human visual perception requires that we give our undivided attention to only one “image” at a time. The drafters of the code were correct in assuming that the attention a commercial sign receives in most traffic situations may be at the expense of the attention given to a nearby, urgently important traffic sign. If that’s true on city streets, it’s also true off city streets.

It’s not easy to comprehend how this could have happened in one of the most automobiling cities in the most automobiling nation in the world. Automobiles do occasionally wander into commercial areas. To understand the problems that drivers will now encounter when they do, we can consider specific cases.

One: You’re driving along Elm Street in heavy traffic and you need to see exactly where the curb cut is so you can turn there to enter the visitors’ parking facility of a large high-rise building. You can’t see the curb because of the other cars ahead of you. Wouldn’t it ease your tension to know in advance exactly where you are supposed to turn?

Two: You’re ready to turn into an opening to a parking lot that you mistakenly took for an entrance: It is an exit. Don’t you want something to tell you “Do not enter” in brash enough terms to grab your attention and prevent the mistake?

Three: You’re preparing to drive a fairly small delivery van onto a parking deck under a “headache bar” (which is placed there to keep heavier trucks capable of causing structural damage off the deck). The bar will crunch into the top of your delivery van. Wouldn’t you rather have a warning sign announcing the clearance dimension boldly enough to prevent the crunch and save you from possible injury?

Four: You’re heading into one of our many drive-in banks. Only two of the seven teller windows are open for business. Wouldn’t it be nice to know which two these are, especially before you lose your place to other customers?

Five: You have an appointment at One Main Place. You intend to park in the underground parking facility there. Before you turn in, you’d like to know whether or not the parking lot is full. But a sign of an adequate size cannot be posted in an appropriate location to tell you.

Six: You drive into a parking lot and, as your wheels roll over a treadle, a row of spikes (which lean away from your wheels) falls to a horizontal position. If for any reason you reverse your direction, your tires will be punctured and seriously damaged. You’d probably like to know that. You’d probably like it expressed to you in fairly strong language on a sign large enough to attract your interest.

Seven: Major hospital complexes such as Parkland, St. Paul’s, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baylor, Irving Community and many others, have three vehicular entrances: an emergency entrance on one side, a visitors’ entrance in the center, and a doctors’ entrance on another side. Let’s say that a few of these hospitals discover that the total frontage of the hospital grounds along the street entitles the hospital to only two signs larger than two feet square (both of which, incidentally, may be illuminated). One of the entrances, the city is saying, must remain virtually unidentified and totally dark. At one time, the hospital could have appealed for a variance. No more. The code is final and unnegotiable.

In all seven of these instances, the new sign standards work against the general safety of the public. How ironic, then, that the ordinance was passed with an appropriately lofty civic purpose: “. . . to promote safety, welfare, convenience and enjoyment of the public.” If these are the objectives against which the ordinance should be measured, then the City Council ought to go back to the drawing boards.

Graphic designers are already at their boards, as developers and shopping centers struggle valiantly to cope with this latest governmental mishap. A few of the solutions that I’ve heard lead me to suspect that we’re about to have more signs and more confusion than we’ve ever had before:

BURMA SHAVE

Some designers are resorting to the use of the “Burma-Shave” principle. The legend is fragmented into sequential signs of a legal size and positioned so that an observer progressively gets the message (the content of which is too large to be displayed legally on a single sign in the first place). Thus, “Do not enter” becomes “Do,” “not,” “enter.” Not only has one sign been magically turned into three, a result antitheti-cal to the intent of the ordinance’s drafters, but the poor driver is already committed before he learns he’s wrong. (There are, of course, situations in which the Burma Shave principle makes for an excellent design solution.).

PORNO-GRAPHICS We could substitute verbal legends with glyphs or pictographs (like those not-readily-intelligible signs in the D/FW terminals). Few earth-persons will know what they mean, naturally, but there are many designers who think they’re cute. If we combined them with the Burma Shave idea, they’d tend to look like the unspecific, but pyrotechnic profanity in comic strip balloons; they could draw an X-rating.

PIDGIN-ENGLISH

Another likely fallout effect will be an exponential deterioration of the English language. Sign legends will be shortened so that they can fit on legal size signs. “Do not enter” might become simply “Don’t,” which loses a little of the authority of the mono-semantic version. Yet, someone years ago put such an abbreviated sign on the grass in Kessler Park which said “Please” and about 95 per cent of the visitors understood what it meant. “Low clearance” might be shortened to “Duck!” English is an adaptable language.

MOSAICS

We shouldn’t be surprised to see another effect upon sign design, a kind of solution-by-circumvention. The ordinance makes no rule against clustering several two-foot-square sign panels, each supported independently, into close proximity and in a single plane so that the total effect is almost as good as putting the legend on a large single sign.



A few minutes’ drive on any Dallas street will quickly inform you that almost everyone is presently in violation of the new ordinance. Jerry Butts, the city zoning inspector, says that 16 inspectors are now working their way across the city, citing private developers for violations.

Right now, as you’re reading this, the private developers are taking down the old-fashioned, readable, safe signs and replacing them with the new, unreadable, legal signs. As long as the City Council continues to opt for prettiness over safety, the average citizen will just have to cope as best he can. Perhaps Dallas motorists can install special bifocal windshields with the lower half ground to each owner’s normal visual requirements and the upper half ground to produce a magnifying effect. That’s about the only way you’re going to be able to read directions.

The truth seems simple enough for the City Council to follow: The automobile driver can operate properly and safely only with clear, accurate information about his immediate environment properly presented, at the moment he needs it. By far the most effective means of presenting such information (Stop, No Left Turn, One Way, No Parking/ Fire Lane) is sign-age. We’ve accepted this as a basic fact of life as far as traffic on our city streets is concerned.

Now we need to recognize another elementary, but equally important, fact of life: Not all the driving in this city is done on city streets.

Unaccountably, the City Council doesn’t seem to grasp the point. The new city sign standards abandon logic at the curb. When a Dallas driver turns into a parking lot, drive-in bank, drive-in theater, shopping center, university campus, hospital grounds, or private development -he still needs clear, accurate information to tell him what’s expected of him.

But in Dallas, Texas, 1975, it is illegal to give him that information ina manner designed to obtain his immediate compliance. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the City would encourage private enterprise to providethat service?