It is a sign of the times: The Obama administration is planning to yield to strapped states and local governments who urged them to slow or be prepared to stop federal safety requirements that they replace thousands of road signs with bigger, brighter, more legible signs by 2018, arguing it would be the wrong way to make them to spend their limited money.

The administration plans to issue a proposal Tuesday to eliminate dozens of deadlines for replacing traffic signs to comply with safety standards initiated under the Bush administration, saying that communities should not be forced to install the new signs until the old ones wear out, officials said.

“A specific deadline for replacing street signs makes no sense and would have cost communities across America millions of dollars in unnecessary expenses,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement. “After speaking with local and state officials across the country, we are proposing to eliminate these burdensome regulations. It’s just plain common sense.”

The recommendations calling for the new signs were in the most recent edition of the “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices,” a book of national road sign standards published by the Federal Highway Administration that is to street planners what Strunk and White is to writers or Hoyle’s is to gamblers. If its strictures are sometimes mocked as picayune and procrustean — “When a mixed-case legend is used, the height of the lower-case letters shall be 3/4 of the height of the initial upper-case letter” — they are designed to make driving safer by helping aging drivers read traffic signs more easily, especially at night.