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  #61  
Old Posted Sep 9, 2020, 1:17 PM
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Fredericton has fairly generic signs, but they're all pretty new (last 15 years probably) and all of them are the same high-reflective material they use for highway signs. The previous signs are hard to spot. They aren't reflective, but the only way to identify them is the lack of bilingualism. Here's one where there's new and old on the same pole, plus a green sign beside them signifying a change in street name. I haven't seen any super-old ones anywhere.

There is a special set of signs for Downtown as well as for Marysville and the Town Plat. To this day, I don't know what the thing on the Downtown signs is. The Marysville signs each have the outline of one of the historic buildings there.

Some major streets have larger signs on the light standards, albeit selectively.

Speaking of light standards, downtown is transitioning to a new retro style.

UNB also has its own style.
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  #62  
Old Posted Sep 9, 2020, 1:50 PM
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Some major streets have larger signs on the light standards, albeit selectively.
That Montgomery sign has a nice font.
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  #63  
Old Posted Sep 9, 2020, 1:55 PM
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Fredericton has fairly generic signs, but they're all pretty new (last 15 years probably) and all of them are the same high-reflective material they use for highway signs. The previous signs are hard to spot. They aren't reflective, but the only way to identify them is the lack of bilingualism.
I have noticed that NB in recent years began imposing bilingual street signs on municipalities of a certain size, regardless of local demographics. I can only assume this is a provincial thing as I can't imagine 100% anglophone or francophone towns would take the initiative to bilingualize all of their street signs.
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  #64  
Old Posted Sep 9, 2020, 3:28 PM
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I have noticed that NB in recent years began imposing bilingual street signs on municipalities of a certain size, regardless of local demographics. I can only assume this is a provincial thing as I can't imagine 100% anglophone or francophone towns would take the initiative to bilingualize all of their street signs.
In NB, if a community is categorized as a 'City' they have to provide bilingual servicing to its citizens regardless of linguistic makeup. The threshold is typically 10,000 residents but there's nothing forcing a community to change from a town or village into a city, hence why suburbs like Quispamsis or Riverview are still towns.

Other items such as municipal taxation and the provision of fire/protective services also change once city status is attained.

Saint John, as one example, has to provide all of its city council hearings and proceedings in English and French regardless of local demand or linguistic breakdown of its residents. IIRC there was a year where there was a single request for French proceedings out of the hundreds they have in a given year.

Bathurst does this thing where they simply don't use Rue or St on their signs. Dieppe, despite being something like 90%+ Francophone, is a city and thus has to have bilingual signage.

Some towns voluntarily provide bilingual signage (Shediac, IIRC) but a lot do not.

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  #65  
Old Posted Sep 9, 2020, 3:45 PM
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Fredericton also has number of corners with the old wooden signs still attached to the building. They get more and more absurd the further you get from downtown.
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  #66  
Old Posted Sep 9, 2020, 4:42 PM
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What's strange? They can do it and benefit massively from federal jobs and employment. Seems pretty straightforward ....
The fact that something is happening, or can happen, doesn't prevent that thing from being strange. I'm not sure what your point is there.
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  #67  
Old Posted Sep 10, 2020, 12:22 AM
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The fact that something is happening, or can happen, doesn't prevent that thing from being strange. I'm not sure what your point is there.
Regardless, embracing the broader Canadian duality and reality does not just involve cosmetic things such as street signs. As such I am not certain that Gatineau as a city does worse than Ottawa does as a city on this front.
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  #68  
Old Posted Sep 11, 2020, 3:36 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Franco401 View Post
Some major streets have larger signs on the light standards, albeit selectively.
The odd thing about Fredericton is that the original first large signs were mounted on the traffic pole closest to the facing driver - so if you were close up, you might not be able to see it above you:



The more recent ones are mounted on the pole across the intersection, where they are more visible:



Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
Though Ottawa's signs (both old and current) always include the generic (street, avenue, road, chemin, rue) in both languages.
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Originally Posted by SkahHigh View Post
Ottawa Street sign by Larry, sur Flickr
Ottawa still has some pre-amalgamation signs with the former Ottawa-Carleton Regional Municipality coats of arms:



After the merger, some of these were updated by simply putting a sticker with the new City of Ottawa logo on top:



The official current street sign font is a 65% condensed Frutiger (shown here on "Rideau"), but some are incorrectly in Helvetica (shown here on "Sussex"):



There is also a National Capital Commission sign for the streets that make up "Confederation Boulevard". Originally they were all gray (above, "Sussex" blade), but have been updated to match the City of Ottawa white-on-blue, Frutiger font and civic numbers (below, "Sussex" blade):



Ottawa does a good job with details like putting the City logo after the name when there is a directional arrow, for balance



but sometimes they don't leave enough space above and below the text to ensure visibility



Also, on some major roads (generally, ones that are also regional roads) there are highway-style white-on-green signs. Some of these are in the same Frutiger font



but others are in Clearview



though most are in good old Highway Gothic

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  #69  
Old Posted Sep 11, 2020, 2:22 PM
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Originally Posted by caveat.doctor View Post
The odd thing about Fredericton is that the original first large signs were mounted on the traffic pole closest to the facing driver - so if you were close up, you might not be able to see it above you:



The more recent ones are mounted on the pole across the intersection, where they are more visible:







Ottawa still has some pre-amalgamation signs with the former Ottawa-Carleton Regional Municipality coats of arms:



After the merger, some of these were updated by simply putting a sticker with the new City of Ottawa logo on top:



The official current street sign font is a 65% condensed Frutiger (shown here on "Rideau"), but some are incorrectly in Helvetica (shown here on "Sussex"):



There is also a National Capital Commission sign for the streets that make up "Confederation Boulevard". Originally they were all gray (above, "Sussex" blade), but have been updated to match the City of Ottawa white-on-blue, Frutiger font and civic numbers (below, "Sussex" blade):



Ottawa does a good job with details like putting the City logo after the name when there is a directional arrow, for balance



but sometimes they don't leave enough space above and below the text to ensure visibility



Also, on some major roads (generally, ones that are also regional roads) there are highway-style white-on-green signs. Some of these are in the same Frutiger font



but others are in Clearview



though most are in good old Highway Gothic

Excellent compilation for Ottawa!

I actually prefer the full grey on the Confederation Boulevard signs.

Adapting them with the blue and white of regular Ottawa signs looks like an awkward mash-up.

As a general comment I find Ottawa's street signage is very inconsistent and doesn't seem to follow any type of standard.

Your examples illustrate this quite well, with different fonts on the exact same type of blue sign, or those green signs which are all over the place in terms of fonts, and also wording on some that have the generic (rue/street, chemin/road) and others which only say the name of the road like "Brookfield".

The latter can be a bit confusing for outsiders who may not know if the sign is pointing to a community or to a road. If I am not familiar with Ottawa, I might think that Brookfield is a town or suburb, if that's the only word on a green guide sign.
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  #70  
Old Posted Sep 11, 2020, 2:39 PM
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I am not always fond of how they do those large signs on traffic signals at major intersections here in Québec.

The French language provides a unique challenge in that many street names have "de la", "des" or "du" between the generic and the specific.

So the question is, what do you do with that? Do you leave it out, leave it in, or write out the whole thing, which can be quite long for this type of sign: "Boulevard de la Cité-des-Jeunes"? Even "Boul. de la Cité-des-Jeunes" is pretty long.

Here is one near Gatineau's casino which includes the "de la" but not the type of road it is, which is a boulevard. It just looks wonky especially since they put a capital D on the "de" which doesn't really make sense.

https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.44894...7i13312!8i6656

Here is another downtown which is a bit better with "Boul. des" in smaller font to save some space. Not crazy about its placement above the city logo, though.

https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4324...7i16384!8i8192

They have these large intersection signs in Mexico and Brazil, and they have a similar language structure to ours, but I can't recall how they deal with it.
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  #71  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 1:25 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by caveat.doctor View Post
The odd thing about Fredericton is that the original first large signs were mounted on the traffic pole closest to the facing driver - so if you were close up, you might not be able to see it above you:



The more recent ones are mounted on the pole across the intersection, where they are more visible:



Yeah, the city definitely made a transition when it did Regent/Prospect (a very interesting intersection from a highway planning perspective and the busiest signallized intersection in the province). Here's Prospect/Smythe, redone one year before Regent/Prospect to prepare for having that overpass closed:



And Regent/Queen, redone 2019:

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  #72  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 3:32 AM
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I'm pretty sure Windsor is the only city in Ontario where address numbers go up by 100 for each block (modelled after Detroit's address system).
Fort William (the southern half of Thunder Bay) does this, on my street the numbers go up to 147/247/347 etc then skip to the next hundred, and on the cross street it goes up to 140 on the first block, 238 on the second, and it varies on the third since they're on an angle. There are also places where two surveyed areas are across the street, so on the cross street closest to me, the 400 block and 300 block actually share the street, because on one side only three streets have crossed it but on the other side, 4 streets have crossed it, putting 411 directly across from 316. It also happens to be at a bend, so 262 is right beside 300. Go a bit further west and it gets even more silly, with only 1 or 2 houses per block on the cross streets, you get 500 and 502, then 600 and 602, then 700 and 702, etc. It gets into the thousands within less than a mile. It's a navigational aid; you can replace the street names with numbers, and if you know that Norah is the 13th street and Franklin is the 14th, then any address that is 13xx on a cross street is between them. Likewise, Victoria is the 0 point (and numbers start at 100), and 400 south is 4 blocks south of Victoria.

Then gets up to 2800 and resets to 100, and all the street names have the word "West" added to the front, as opposed to the end which is what is done for the north-south streets and any that do have an "east" in the name at some point. West Arthur Street instead of Arthur Street West because the eastern part is just Arthur Street, but Victoria Avenue West because we have a Victoria Avenue East. Because the 100-block system is easy, but we need to keep people on their toes. Not sure if any other city does this And that address re-set has been within Fort William's city limits since 1907 at least, it was undeveloped swamp at the time.

In Port Arthur, numbers just continue going up as you get further away from Red River/Dawson Road (the x axis) or the lake (the y axis). Outside of the pre-1970 city limits, the numbers increase as you head to the west or north/south away from the Kaministiquia River, and increase by 1 every 10 meters, so every 100 the number increases is a kilometer west of... an arbitrarily placed axis. So if you see an address like "6546 Government Road", you know that that address is 6.546km west of the imaginary line where the numbers start counting up. It actually varies slightly depending on the street.

Also, another silly thing we've started doing, is new streets on the water front are numbered the same way as rural streets but with the 0 line at the northeast corner of the city, and increasing by 1 every 8 meters (with odd on the east and even on the west), because that's logical. So we have 2260 Sleeping Giant Parkway, ~9km south of the northern edge of the city limits.

Also in the south end, even numbers are northbound and eastbound, while in the north, even numbers are southbound and westbound. This was done on purpose in the early 1900s to make amalgamation difficult by preventing unified street names, which is likely why the new numbering system with a 0 point at the city's northern edge has been created but I don't know for sure. At one point on my street where the old city limit crosses, 1101 Simpson Street is across from 1101 Fort William Road. Nothing is addressed to those addresses, but if they were, that situation would be possible. Which is absurd, but there's little we can do about it, both streets have dozens of homes and hundreds of businesses on them, including over 100 in the city's largest mall. The entire length of street has 8 names and 10 "100 blocks".

Last edited by vid; Sep 12, 2020 at 3:51 AM.
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  #73  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 3:48 AM
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In Winnipeg, fires, crimes etc. are almost invariably officially described as having occurred in the "X-hundred block of Y street" ... actual addresses are rarely given. It's sometimes kind of absurd, as when they say there was a fire in a "hotel in the 500 block" of whatever street and clearly there is only one hotel anywhere near the place in question. But they really seem to have an aversion to pinpointing any type of event.

There are a few parts of the city that are in a grid pattern where each block begins 100, 200, 300, 400 etc. but not many. Winnipeg was created before the era of rational planning -- around 1890, in an attempt to be thoroughly modern, the city council renamed most of the streets with numbers but after a few years of trying to convince citizens to use the new designations, they gave up and the names were made official again.
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  #74  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 3:56 AM
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We do the same in Thunder Bay with news articles and addresses, it's actually law enforcement and fire department that are doing that in their press releases and the press not bothering to make the article more specific. It's even more absurd when they say something like "there was a robbery at a coffee shop on North May Street", and there's only one coffee shop on that street and it's a Tim Hortons. The police don't want to single out the address or business in their press release. It can get pretty absurd sometimes, they might say "there was a robbery at an X street business" and post a grainy security video but not tell you when, what business, or what was taken, so the information is essentially useless. One day a few years ago the police literally put out a press release that was something like, "There was an assault at a North Cumberland Street business over the weekend. Police are asking the public to assist in finding the suspect." and then provided absolutely no other details and there was never a follow up.
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  #75  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 2:29 PM
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Originally Posted by Acajack View Post
As a general comment I find Ottawa's street signage is very inconsistent and doesn't seem to follow any type of standard.

Your examples illustrate this quite well, with different fonts on the exact same type of blue sign, or those green signs which are all over the place in terms of fonts, and also wording on some that have the generic (rue/street, chemin/road) and others which only say the name of the road like "Brookfield".

The latter can be a bit confusing for outsiders who may not know if the sign is pointing to a community or to a road. If I am not familiar with Ottawa, I might think that Brookfield is a town or suburb, if that's the only word on a green guide sign.
I think it really is operator dependent - whomever happens to be making the signs that day decides the formatting. Might be as simple as the default font on the computer is Helvetica and they forgot to change to Frutiger. Or that they already picked the size template when putting in the name, realised that the street type (rue/street, etc) wouldn't fit, so they went with name only instead of starting over from scratch.

I think the more confusing inconsistency is when streets have two-word names. E.g., all streets named after people use their last names only, except for random exceptions like Lorry Greenberg Dr, Eric Czapnik Way, etc. It does look like they actually use these full names on signage though:





But when it's a two-word named street, usage varies. E.g., Holly Acres Rd is also signed as Acres Rd:





For a road that is supposed to be the scenic route aimed at tourists visiting Ottawa - i.e., people not familiar with this random Ottawa practice of sometimes-both-words, sometime-just-the-last-one - it's a wayfinding fail. You're approaching on the highway and the blue sign clues you in to watch for "Ch Acres Rd"... but you'll never find it.

(Bonus - once you're actually on (Holly) Acres Rd, you can go "TO/VERS" or "To/ver" Ch Richmond Rd)

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  #76  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 2:42 PM
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Yeah, the city definitely made a transition when it did Regent/Prospect (a very interesting intersection from a highway planning perspective and the busiest signallized intersection in the province). Here's Prospect/Smythe, redone one year before Regent/Prospect to prepare for having that overpass closed:
Yeah, it does look like they've fixed that problem and have gotten more consistent, good to see!

Fredericton (and NB highways) seem to be pretty good generally. They are better at marking the lanes right on the traffic lights so you know if a lane is left turn only, for example. If you saw the light to know to stop/go, you will also have definitely seen where this lane is supposed to go:



In Ottawa, there are signs telling you a lane ahead becomes left turn only, but they are often too far ahead of the intersection that you don't notice it. E.g., this one is two blocks ahead of the actual intersection where the lanes become restricted:



But once you get there, there's nothing (other than pavement paint - usually unnoticed, especially in wintertime) telling you that the left lane is left turn only. Fair number of sideswipes here all the time when two cars side-by-side try to go straight ahead and squeeze into the one lane:

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  #77  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 4:11 PM
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(Bonus - once you're actually on (Holly) Acres Rd, you can go "TO/VERS" or "To/ver" Ch Richmond Rd)

Nice typo there! I guess no one ever complained! Or noticed.
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  #78  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 4:18 PM
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I think it really is operator dependent - whomever happens to be making the signs that day decides the formatting. Might be as simple as the default font on the computer is Helvetica and they forgot to change to Frutiger. Or that they already picked the size template when putting in the name, realised that the street type (rue/street, etc) wouldn't fit, so they went with name only instead of starting over from scratch.
I believe you, but I think that does speak to a lack of consistency and standardization. (Though MTO is also sometimes like this - though it seems like they've been moving to a more standardized approach in recent years.)

Most jurisdictions I've been in (and I am a geek for these things) are quite a bit more standardized when it comes to how their signage and wayfinding appear and are predictable for users.
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  #79  
Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 4:22 PM
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I think the more confusing inconsistency is when streets have two-word names. E.g., all streets named after people use their last names only, except for random exceptions like Lorry Greenberg Dr, Eric Czapnik Way, etc. It does look like they actually use these full names on signage though:
]
I think that Anglo/British tradition favours the surname only for streets named for people, whereas the francophone tradition leans more towards using the full name.

Of course there are and always have been more exceptions. Though the general trend I've been seeing in recent years has been to use more and more full names. In Quebec, Ontario and elsewhere in Canada-USA too.
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Old Posted Sep 12, 2020, 4:25 PM
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In Winnipeg, fires, crimes etc. are almost invariably officially described as having occurred in the "X-hundred block of Y street" ... actual addresses are rarely given. It's sometimes kind of absurd, as when they say there was a fire in a "hotel in the 500 block" of whatever street and clearly there is only one hotel anywhere near the place in question. But they really seem to have an aversion to pinpointing any type of event.

There are a few parts of the city that are in a grid pattern where each block begins 100, 200, 300, 400 etc. but not many. Winnipeg was created before the era of rational planning -- around 1890, in an attempt to be thoroughly modern, the city council renamed most of the streets with numbers but after a few years of trying to convince citizens to use the new designations, they gave up and the names were made official again.
I have noticed that Ottawa police and media have begun doing this over the past couple years. They never did that before.

It poses a bit of a comical challenge for francophone media as there is no easy, nice-sounding way to say "the 100 block of Rideau Street" in French.

"Dans le bloc 100 de la rue Rideau" sounds both low-brow and confusing, whereas "dans le pâté de maisons 100 de la rue Rideau" is close to being grammatically correct, but extremely unwieldy.
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