Earlier this year, the Federal Highway Administration made a controversial announcement, about fonts. Effective immediately, the agency announced, it would rescind its approval of Clearview, a typeface designed to make highway signs easier to read.

The Highway Administration, which, among other things, oversees federal funding for highway construction and maintenance, had given the typeface provisional endorsement in 2004. Studies had found it more legible, and therefore safer, than the Standard Alphabets for Traffic Control Devices—more commonly called Highway Gothic—which had gone largely unchanged for more than half a century. Many of America's highway signs were subsequently updated; if you've driven in Pennsylvania, Texas, or some 20 other states, you've probably seen the typeface yourself. Clearview has both a classroom kind of simplicity and government-issued authority. Its letterforms are a little taller, a little roomier, and—under certain circumstances—more identifiable than the font it replaced.

The announcement made for much handwringing. The New York Times ("Easy-Reading Road Signs Head to the Offramp") and CityLab ("America's Sudden U-Turn on Highway Fonts") seemed to herald the immediate demise of the safer highway signs. In reality, the Highway Administration's decision applies only to new signage. “Existing signs that use the provisional letter style and comply with the Interim Approval [of Clearview] are unaffected by this action and may remain as long as they are in serviceable condition,” the statement reads.

The feds started warning states to the forthcoming change as early as 2013. But the January 25 decision took Donald Meeker, a partner at Meeker & Associates and the co-creator of Clearview, by surprise. Meeker says he doesn’t know what prompted the notice, other than the Highway Administration’s inherent conservatism. “We find it a little bizarre," he says. "Anybody that uses this and uses it extensively knows that it’s working well.”

According the Highway Administration, however, followup studies on Clearview's legibility were less conclusive than earlier inquiries. The agency is open to reviewing a better font, a spokesperson told WIRED, but its current stance on Clearview is all about clarity and consistency. What's more, the agency says, the government didn't want state and local officials thinking they had to incur the cost of replacing signs just to introduce Clearview.

Design as Activism?

Typefaces are rarely heralded as groundbreaking, but in 2004, Clearview seemed to be exactly that.

Meeker began working on it 1991, after noticing what he calls the "crummy" state of highway signs in Oregon. "Why do all highway signs have to be so cluttered and difficult to read,” he says he wondered. So, with transportation researchers at Penn State University and with funding from 3M, Meeker and his team started exploring how to improve the the Highway Administration's Standard Highway Alphabet, the design originally developed in 1945 and, again, known colloquially as Highway Gothic. Meeker wanted something more legible, especially for America's older drivers.

Like Highway Gothic, there's a simplicity to Clearview that makes it ideal for ushering drivers along the highway at high speeds. Both typefaces are similar to Transport, a highway road sign typeface British designers Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert developed in 1958. Clearview’s biggest difference is in the interstices of its letters: Meeker and his colleagues opened them up, so that the eyes of letters like b, e, and a are bigger. They made lowercase letters a little taller, and gave some letters longer tails. The goal was to give the letters more definition, because road sign letters—especially white ones—can appear fuzzy when illuminated by headlight beams.

In 1997, Penn State researchers subjected Clearview to a range of legibility tests. The results were unambiguously positive, showing that Clearview increased nighttime reading distance by as much as 16 percent. In 2001, a team led by Texas A&M transportation researcher Paul Carlson independently confirmed that Clearview improved the recognition distance of highway signs by as much as 12 percent, a difference of 74 feet over Highway Gothic.

That might not sound like much, but 74 feet provides someone driving 70 mph an extra seven-tenths of a second to react. Denis Pelli, an NYU researcher who studies how typography influences legibility, says even that small a margin matters. Millions of people are killed or injured on US roads each year. It's hard to say how many of those crashes might have been prevented with better signage, but with so many accidents, says Pelli, "something that is innocuous for everyone else"—like a font—"it seems to save lives. This is worth everyone making a fuss over."

The Federal Highway Administration agreed. In 2004, it approved the optional use of Clearview, citing the studies from Penn State and Texas A&M. More than 20 states adopted the new typeface to some degree. In 2011 the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum added the Clearview family of typefaces to its collection, calling it "a beautiful example of design as a form of social activism."

The Decline of Clearview

But the Highway Administration granted Clearview provisional approval, pending further investigation. The studies out of Penn State and Texas A&M had demonstrated Clearview's improved legibility on positive contrast signs—for instance, those with white letters on a green background. It wasn't clear how Clearview would perform on signs of negative contrast—that is, signs with black letters on a yellow, orange, or white background. In 2006, a followup study at Texas A&M found that Clearview offered no significant benefit over Highway Gothic in such cases. In fact, nighttime recognition tests found that replacing Clearview actually decreased the distance at which people could read negative-contrast highway signs.

The fact that Clearview increased recognition distance in some circumstances but decreased it in others was troubling. Additional studies from Texas A&M found that Clearview did not always lead to a significant improvement in legibility distance, and that when it did, "it was an improvement of about 3 to 12 percent." To further confuse things, it is possible that some of the perceived benefits of Clearview might actually have to do with a materials innovation introduced in 2003. “After more than a decade of analysis," agency administrator Gregory Nadeau wrote in a recent blog post, "we learned that retro-reflective sign sheeting materials that direct a vehicle’s headlamp beams back to the observer were the primary determining factor in improved nighttime visibility and legibility.”

So, the Highway Administration decided to stop allowing Clearview. If that sounds like typographic dictatorship, consider the agency's job is to promote highway safety. In theory, the FHWA could have decreed that all future positive contrast signs be printed in Clearview. But because states have to pay a one-time licensing fee to Meeker & Associates to use Clearview (a full family of the font costs $800, Meeker says, “and they can use it from now until the end of time”), that’s a difficult edict to make.

“It’s a shame for the states,” Meeker says. He and his colleagues aren’t pursuing any kind of formal action in regard to Clearview, because it’s not an essential part of the firm’s business. And despite what seem like valid criticisms on the part of the Federal Highway Administration, Meeker remains vocal about his disappointment with its decision. “Highway signage is the single most visible manifestation of the government in our day-to-day," he says. "Everybody knows [the old typeface] looks like a dog’s lunch.”