[street_blades, info_design] New Portland Overhead Signs, and a New Street

1164. If you've been looking up and forward whilst waiting at any light in the Portland corporate area latterly, you'll have seen a sign bound to the overhead like this:

The City is, at last, addressing a real need in road signage. Most other larger towns up and down the valley (and across the Columbia too) have large signs denoting the street name on the traffic signal arm. Any driver who's been saved from having to frantically scan about on the corners to see what street they're crossing don't need to be told how good this is.

The standard has seemed to have been set; the iconic representation of the "Portland Rose", the red rose with three green leaves, and a simple representation of the street name at cross.

The notation on this particular sign deserves some explanation. For the past several months, a major realignment of the connection between Killingsworth Street and Columbia Boulevard has been becoming reality. The old Columbia Boulevard opening, a two-lane underpass under the railroad tracks, is a bottleneck. This old T intersection is being deprecated (and looks like it's being closed completely) in favor of a new higher-capacity, split access to a short road which is apparently being called Columbia Parkway, which goes frm NE 89th Avenue and Killingsworth Street over to Columbia Boulevard at the Holiday Inn Airport.

The (SB) denotes the split access–Columbia Pkwy splits into separated Northbound lanes and Southbound lanes.

The old part of Columbia Blvd east of that new intersection (which is also fully signalled) appears headed to a destiny as a dead-end stub.

Technorati Tags: pdx pdx geography,sign design,information design,Street Blades

[sign_design, info_design] County Highways in Oregon

1162. One thing not seen often in Oregon are signed county routes. I think this is unfortunate, because having county route numbers are a really nifty way of instilling terrior, a sense of place, and saying "follow Country Route 3" dispenses with all sorts of "go left here ... or was that right ...no, wait, start over" monologue that even I (and you can't get me lost very easily anyhwere in the Valley north of Corvallis) tend to get into (the brain is a funny thing).

There is one county in Oregon that implements a badged county road network, and that county is Douglas. It's a little hard to find maps with the route numbers on online–I do have a map of them, but that's off the official Douglas County map of 1990, an illustration of which is at left (click the map to embiggen).

The county road shield is a standard one: gold FHWA-style type on blue field, an irregular pentagon taller than wide, with mitred corners on the bottom two points and rounded corners on the top three. I've created what Douglas County Route 1's shield probably looks like.

I think one Good Thing to Do™ would be to institute a county route badging system in Oregon's counties, at least the Willamette Valley's. People who still complain about finding their way around Portland (even though it's largely simply laid out) would do with a City Route system (such badging regimes already exist in Winnipeg and Charlotte NC (though Charlotte only has the one badged route, Charlotte Route 4, but they personalize it with a city logo, which makes it kind of cool). This may become important in the near term as we seem to have this mania for renaming roads ...

We'll come up with our own design for those presently. Marion County, with trunk roads converging on the capital city, has particularly interesting numbering possiblities.

Tags: Oregon Geography, Oregon Counties, County Roads, Douglas County, Marion County, Multnomah County, sign design, information design