I’ve always loved the LED signs that hover above the freeways here in Los Angeles.
Sometimes, they’ll remind us that if we drive high, we’ll get a DUI. On rare occasions, they’ll warn us of flash floods. Most of the time, though, they just tell us how much longer we’ll be sitting bumper to bumper.
Caltrans is responsible for the installation, maintenance, and messaging for each of the 145 signs in the county. A loose set of guidelines dictate how the messages, limited to three lines of 16 characters each, can communicate. In a city famous for confusing signs with prophesies, each readout scans as a poem and ticks like a clock.
I’ve developed favorites over the years — the sign above the 2 near the Verdugo Rd offramp situates itself beautifully against the San Gabriel Mountains, and if you’re going northbound on the 101 at just the right moment you can catch the sun fading behind the sign across from the exit at Melrose and Normandie.
A few years ago, I stumbled across an access point for the signage system on the Caltrans website. I was instantly filled with a very specific type of Southern Californian pleasure — the whole sprawl laid out before me, all of it at once.
Ever since, I’ve wanted to make a single-serving site that pulls a message at random from somewhere in the Southland. I’ve got a version of that running now, and you can see more
@minutes__to
Sometimes you just have to make a little bit of meaning out of the traffic.
