Federal Mixed Case

Conservatives may have a point on government overreach, especially when it comes to local issues like street signage. The federal government canceled a scheduled regulation that would have required - get this - municipalities to use street indicator signs with mixed-case lettering instead of capital letters only. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who is easily the last Republican in Washington with common sense (at least after his fellow Illinoisan, new Senator Mark Kirk, proved not to have any) said that such a regulation would have placed an undue burden on municipal governments by requiring them to spend money they do not have on new street signage they do not need.

I wonder how New York - with a lot of numbered streets - would have handled it. Mixed-case numbers? :-D

In my hometown of West Caldwell, New Jersey, a hodgepodge of differently styled street signage from different eras was recently replaced with new uniform signage that features the town's seal (and a star on signs for streets named for servicemen who served in wartime), and most of it already has mixed-case lettering. Nearby Livingston, New Jersey also just put up new mixed-case street signs. In each case, this now-canceled regulation must have been anticipated. Some of the first of the new signs put up in West Caldwell, though, had capital letters, and had these regulations gone through, it would have cost little to replace them. There are so few of them. For other cities and towns in New Jersey - Newark, for example - the cost would have been too much for them to bear. Municipal governments in both New Jersey and the rest of the country are strapped as it is.