If you've ever needed some direction in your life, you've probably turned to a street sign for help.
There are thousands of them in St. Albert, and every one of them is placed and maintained by David Graham and a handful of others at the City of St. Albert's sign shop.
They've got a wall-sized map covered with labels and pins to track every signpost and barricade in town, and shelves stacked with of stop, yield, speed, warning, no parking, and pick-up-after-your-dog signs.
"We currently have approximately just over 9,000 signs out in the city for traffic," says the eight-year veteran of the public works department. In any given year, he and his crews will place or replace up to a thousand of them.
"If somebody hits a sign or it gets graffiti (on it) or fades out, we go out and fix them."
Virtually all of the signs in Graham's shop come from ATS Traffic Group. Housed in a huge grey and red building on the east edge of Edmonton, it's one of the biggest sign manufacturers in the province, and makes most of the street signs in Alberta.
And Wayne Davidson has had a hand in most of them. As the company's corporate production manager, he oversees much of the production process and has been with ATS for about 30 years.
We live in a visual society, and signs can tell us so much with just a glance, he says.
"If I'm driving somewhere and there's no signage, I get upset," he says.
"When I see a big sign with a direction, I love it."
Handcrafted directions
ATS cranked out 205,160 signs last year, Davidson says, with Rain Man-like accuracy – way up from the 146,255 they did the year before, and probably five or six times more than they made when he started this job.
"It's government regulation for sure," he says – as regulations and the need for road safety rises, so do the number of signs.
But the process of making those signs hasn't changed much in the last 30 years and is still very hands-on, he continues. Automation has started to creep into the industry, but when 55 per cent of their orders are for 18 signs or less, it's usually cheaper and quicker to do them by hand.
Davidson and art director Bart Petersen whipped up a custom sign for the Gazette to demonstrate the process.
Pedersen says their turnaround time on most orders is about three days, although a one-off like the Gazette sign can be made in less than an hour.
A street sign starts with a design drawn on the computer and printed on translucent plastic using a plotter, Petersen says. Art department workers then cut out the sign's design with X-acto knives and stick it to a backdrop of 3M reflective tape. For our street sign, they've pasted green over reflective white.
Once the art crew has used squeegees or a roller press to flatten the design, Davidson heads downstairs with it to the machine shop.
He stops by a waist-high stack of aluminium sheets. He says about 85 per cent of the signs ATS makes nowadays are backed with aluminium, although there are still a few plastic and wooden ones out there. They went through 1.1 million pounds of aluminium last year.
"It's a lot of signs coming out of there."
Most of their aluminium comes in sheets smaller than four feet by 12 feet, although they do use extruded aluminium panels that are 24 feet long for the really big highway signs, Davidson says.
In the old days, crews would chop these panels into shape by hand. As of last year, they do most of their cutting with a $500,000 computer-guided drill that can cut up to a thousand sheets per day, allowing them to do the same work with less people.
The aluminium sheets arrive shiny with oil, he continues – it would be very tough to pull them apart due to the friction otherwise. Since the reflective tape won't stick to oil, they have to remove the oil by tossing the sheets into a vat of hydrofluoric acid for about 15 minutes first.
The sheets head across the room to a station full of automatic and hand-cranked rolling machines. A worker strips the paper off the back of the reflective tape to reveal the adhesive, positions it over the sign, and runs it through a roller.
The glue on the tape is incredibly aggressive, and Davidson says he's never seen one peel off a sign.
"If we make a mistake on it, there's no getting it off."
Crews then cut off any excess tape – preferably using big, dull butcher knives – and send the sign off to shipping.
"That's how a street sign is made," Davidson says, as the Gazette sign rolls off the line.
Print jobs
Regulatory signs (such as stops and speed signs) are usually ordered en-masse, which makes cutting out individual letters by hand impractical.
Instead, they're made with screen-printing – a process familiar to anyone who's ever made a custom T-shirt.
The art folks upstairs cover a mesh screen with emulsion, cut an image of the sign (e.g. the word "Stop") out of impermeable plastic film, put it on the emulsion, and then "shoot" it with strong light to harden everything that's not covered, Davidson says. The unhardened emulsion gets washed off, leaving a negative image through which ink can pass.
Downstairs, crews cut out a sign from aluminium, stick the appropriate reflective tape background to it, and hand it to the screen-printers. The printers lock the screen on top of the sign and squeegee ink through it to create the image.
For big orders – say, a thousand copies – crews will feed each panel through an automatic screen-printer for speed, Davidson says. These mechanical printers still use a squeegee but are so precise that they can cut ink use by about a third.
The signs then dry in a room full of fans for up to eight hours before they're ready to ship.
Not every sign comes out right. Davidson recalls once years ago when the City of Edmonton ordered a bunch of pink heart-shaped signs that said "Free Public Parking" from them, for example. It wasn't until crews printed 500 of them that they realized they'd left out the "L" in "Public."
"'Free Pubic Parking' in this big heart!" he says, laughing.
"I'm glad we caught that one!"
Once delivered, Graham and his crew bolt or strap the signs to posts and put them in place. Provincial standards dictate that these signs be exactly 200 centimetres above ground in most cases. Each sign costs $30 to $100, depending on size and content, and lasts 15 to 25 years, depending on weather and lighting.
The future, next right
Speed and visibility are the name of the game when it comes to the future of street signs, Davidson says. Signs have become significantly more reflective and visible in the last 15 years (and will likely continue to improve), and are also getting bigger – he's seen Florida street sign blades that are 12 inches tall and visible from a block away.
Fast-drying inks, UV dryers, and automatic printers already let companies crank out signs with colours and images screen-printing can't match, he continues. But these technologies aren't up to industry standard yet – the signs they make fade after five years, and street-signs are expected to last 10 to 12.
Although he expects automation to eventually allow for same-day delivery for signs, Davidson says he doesn't expect hand-made traffic signs will ever disappear entirely – they're simply too cheap and efficient.
"Sometimes, the old way is the best way."
