Talk:Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices

Citations needed?

It would be useful if whomever placed the 'Citations Needed' tag on this article stated where they think citations are missing! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Triskele Jim (talk • contribs) 17:45, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to remove this tag if no in-text requests for citations can be produced.Synchronism (talk) 22:50, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, the TAMU history page that should be added back to the links section can be used to specifically cite the history section. Furthermore, additional documents should be cited, including Standard Highway Signs (which IIRC has the font specification). Also a bit funny that font isn't hyperlinked to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FHWA_Series_fonts. Jpgs (talk) 14:56, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

External Links

I don't believe it's appropriate to throw a cite at Wikipedia:EL and start deleting external links in batches. Might be better to have some discussion first. Yes, weed out the irrelevant and spam, but don't just throw a bunch out based on your own personal opinions as to what's 'relevant'. I've reverted the deletions until some discussion can be had. RCMoeur (talk) 15:36, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Its the otherway around. WP:EL states link essential to the topic only. Most of those failed that without discussion. You can argue their inclusion, but I can't see how RoadGeek fonts or the history page on the Texas A&M site would qualify. The latter could be used as reference, of course. -- KelleyCook (talk) 18:01, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

I took a look at the removal of those links as well, and while I personally like those links, they were really only tangentially relevant to this topic, and so it was probably correct to remove them. (Even still, I like those links well enough that I posted them on my user page.) --Dachannien^Talk_Contrib 02:13, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

I strongly disagree that some of the links are only "tangentially relevant". The Texas A&M link http://tcd.tamu.edu/documents/MUTCD_History.htm is all about the MUTCD and its historical development, and contains published papers that could also be used to solve the citation issue. R.C. Moeur's site http://www.trafficsign.us/ is an accessible way for the general public to access information in the MUTCD; he is a working professional and has contributed to Usenet and the Web for well over a decade. His a transportation engineer, and member of the NUTCD, which produces the MUTCD. Finally, the roeadgeek fonts http://www.triskele.com/roadgeek-fonts are well established as freely available open fonts to FHWA specification used by the MUTCD (technically specified in one of the auxiliary documents to which this article ought to refer; this article is incorrect to state that the fonts themselves are specified in the MUTCD). I do agree that Web sites of sign manufacturers and collectors are not appropriate for the links section. So, unless there is reasoned disagreement, I'm going to add these three links back. Jpgs (talk) 14:52, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

2009 edition

The 2009 MUTCD is now out, so the article graphics should be updated to those from the '09 edition. Mapsax (talk) 00:35, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

Old MUTCDs online

At the bottom of this page (which is listed in the External Links section of the article), there are links to old MUTCDs either on that site or elsewhere on the web. Those could be used to flesh out the History section. Mapsax (talk) 07:09, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

Michigan

Michigan has state supplement the map is wrong

http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/knowledge/natl_adopt_2000_2003.htm St8fan (talk) 10:13, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

contradiction?

§ Other jurisdictions includes the sentences

Compared to the Vienna Convention, the MUTCD stresses a consistent color scheme (e.g., red always means "prohibited" or "prepare to stop") and relatively large, verbose warning signs. MUTCD guide signs tend to be less verbose than their equivalents in Vienna Convention countries, since they are optimized for reading at high speeds on freeways and expressways.

At first sight this seems to be contradictory, since there has been no previous distinction made between guide signs and warning signs. Although the difference seems clear once the reader thinks about it, explicit definitions based on or quoted from the Manual would spare the reader that unnecessary mental detour.

Thnidu (talk) 23:47, 1 August 2017 (UTC)

Section 2D-02.01 - "Guide signs are essential to direct road users along streets and highways, to inform them of intersecting routes,

to direct them to cities, towns, villages, or other important destinations, to identify nearby rivers and streams, parks, forests, and historical sites, and generally to give such information as will help them along their way in the most simple, direct manner possible.[1]

Section 2C-01.01 - "Warning signs call attention to unexpected conditions on or adjacent to a highway, street, or private roads open to public travel and to situations that might not be readily apparent to road users. Warning signs alert road users to conditions that might call for a reduction of speed or an action in the interest of safety and efficient traffic operations."[2]

This could be summarized as "Guide (or guidance) signs direct or inform road users of their location or of destinations. Warning signs alert users of unexpected or hazardous road conditions that may not be readily apparent." - Floydian ^τ _¢ 18:21, 12 August 2017 (UTC)

I had just come to this talk page to ask about that exact section as I had not noticed the guide vs warning distinction. I have rewritten the section to incorporate Floydian's summary.--Khajidha (talk) 16:46, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Pronunciation

The virtual presentation The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD) – General Overview of Proposed Changes 3-18-21_1 says that the named should be pronounced "M-U-T-C-D" and not as a combination of letters. I would cite it but it's tough to isolate the frame that says it (there's a PDF linked but that's tough to isolate, too), so it might not be worth it for something that's probably trivia, but it's there in case it becomes an issue. Mapsax (talk) 23:20, 27 May 2021 (UTC)

For people in the transportation and/or planning fields, MUTCD has always been pronounced by its initials or referenced by its full name. I don't know if it would be worthy to note as it seems common for federal programs except for cases like National Highway Traffic Safety Administration which is pronounced "NITZ-ah". – The Grid (talk) 03:58, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

The main reason why I brought this up is because the slide explicitly says not to pronounce it like your NHTSA example. If it's not an issue, though, I'm OK letting it be. Mapsax (talk) 00:05, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

About the removal of "funny messages"

The newsgroups reporting on this change seem to stem from The Guardian here. As much as it's a verifiable source, their news bait with the title is what isn't described in the article. They actually provide a better context about the MUTCD: Under the new guidelines, which were laid out in a new 1,100-page manual on America’s signs and other traffic-control devices, signs cannot display messages intended to be humorous or with pop culture references, or anything that could “diminish respect for the sign”.

The MUTCD never states signs cannot display messages intended to be humorous or with pop culture references and in Section 2L.02 (pages 510 and 511) mentions:

01 CMS shall display only traffic operational, regulatory, warning, and guidance information except as otherwise provided in this Chapter. Advertising or other messages not related to traffic control shall not be displayed on a CMS or on its supports or other equipment.

02 CMS may display traffic safety campaign messages (see Section 2L.07), transportation-related messages, emergency homeland security messages, and America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response (AMBER) alert messages, all as provided for in this Chapter.

03 Transportation-related messages for the purpose of improving traffic conditions, such as those providing information on alternative means of transportation, electronic toll collection, or carpooling may be displayed to remind or inform drivers of relevant options or opportunities for transportation.

04 Messages regarding broader transportation items not related to improving traffic conditions, such as reminders of driver’s license or vehicle registration renewal, vehicle recall information, and vehicle maintenance, do not meet the purpose of a transportation-related message.

It could be something the feds might look into further but it never states "banning", it's about bringing into compliance. The 2026 date comes from the standard 2 years after publishing the newest edition of MUTCD (unless the compliance date is specifically mentioned in Table 1B-1).

tldr; much ado about nothing – The Grid (talk) 14:13, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

I never said that the feds "banned" funny VMS messages (other than headlines of reliable sources that I handpicked). I said that they "strongly discouraged" such messages. AlphaBeta135talk 01:27, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Disputing factually incorrect edits on 27 August 2025 by User:Einsof

It appears that User:Einsof did not read and understand the underlying cited source, which is still available.

There are two disputed passages at issue. The first passage which I drafted is as follows:

Despite the title, this manual did not have any guidance on pavement markings. In the archaic American English of the 1920s, the term "road marker" was sometimes used to describe traffic control devices which modern speakers would now call "signs."

User:Einsof revised this to this vague and inaccurate text:

Despite the title, this manual did not have any guidance on pavement markings; the meaning of "road marker" overlapped with the modern usage of the word "sign".

This fails to clearly state that "road marker" is an archaic term not commonly used in modern American English, which is exactly what gives rise to the common confusion among modern speakers encountering this subject for the first time. A modern American English speaker unfamiliar with this issue would naturally assume that "marker" is close enough to "markings" (a false friends situation) and then wonder why a manual about "markers" would not cover "markings". The original text completely eliminates that ambiguity. The revised text does not.

The second passage which I also drafted is as follows:

Although the two manuals were quite similar, both organizations immediately recognized that the existence of two slightly different manuals was unnecessarily awkward, and in 1931 AASHO and NCSHS formed a Joint Committee to develop a uniform standard for both urban streets and rural roads. This standard was the MUTCD.

Einsof revised this to:

Although the two manuals were quite similar, in 1931 both organizations formed a Joint Committee to develop a uniform standard for both urban streets and rural roads; this standard was the MUTCD.

The revised text fails to capture the key point made in the cited source (page A-1, page 97 of the PDF) which I was paraphrasing: "The inherent conflicts created by the existence of two manuals were quickly recognized and efforts were initiated to develop a single manual for both rural and urban conditions."

I already reverted back the first revision and plan to revert back the second too. Coolcaesar (talk) 09:59, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

I understood it just fine, thanks, and readers will have no problem understanding it either. The clause Despite the title, this manual did not have any guidance on pavement markings is enough to tell the reader that "road markers" does not mean "pavement markings", and the clause the meaning of "road marker" overlapped with the modern usage of the word "sign" is enough to tell the reader that the meaning of the word has changed. Readers do not need to be told that if the meaning of a word changed, it implies that American English has also changed; it is too obvious to deserve mention. That is why I said the text comes across as condescending.

The second revision is also fine. Readers are told that a committee was formed to develop a uniform standard. I don't know what kind of reader you are envisioning who needs to have it spelled out for them that the point of uniform standards is to avoid conflicting or incomplete instructions. Einsof (talk) 13:42, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

As any experienced writer is aware, one always considers cognitive load in light of the intended audience of a written work. Keep in mind that many if not most people reading this article by definition will not be familiar with the MUTCD, civil engineering, or standardization.

Your first passage is fatally ambiguous. You focus on how the "meaning of the word has changed". Which word? It's not clear from your version, which is equally susceptible to the false interpretation that the term "road marker" may still be alive but the term "sign" later grew to overlap its meaning. The truth is that "road marker" died and is now regarded as archaic, and then "sign" grew to fill the semantic gap. A good writer always anticipates and eliminates that kind of misunderstanding in order to deliver clear and unambiguous prose. So it's hard to see why you are calling my version "condescending", unless you believe it is not a writer's problem to minimize the cognitive load imposed by their output.

Your second passage, again, assumes deep familiarity with standardization, an extremely obscure activity that most people find to be about as much fun as watching paint dry. (I actually studied the topic as an undergraduate, specifically ISO/IEC JTC 1, but most people have not.) Someone not familiar with standardization would naturally wonder why it's such a big deal if their manuals are so similar. Why can't they happily coexist, or why couldn't one organization drop its manual in favor of the other? Again, my version eliminates that kind of ambiguity.

WP:TONE (part of the writing better articles guideline) explains: "Articles and other encyclopedic content should be written in a formal tone....Encyclopedic writing has a fairly academic approach, while remaining clear and understandable. Formal tone means that the article should not be written using argot, slang, colloquialisms, doublespeak, legalese, or jargon that is unintelligible to an average reader...."

The emphasis here is on "remaining clear and understandable" and not writing "jargon that is unintelligible to an average reader". If your writing asks the reader to correctly draw three rather subtle implicit inferences (the ones you just explained above), you have already failed.

Unfortunately, I am going to be very busy with work for the next two months, and I have other priorities such as uploading photos and fixing extensive damage to other articles by now-banned User:Iknowyoureadog. When I find the time in the fall, I may have to initiate dispute resolution on this issue, starting with an RfC. --Coolcaesar (talk) 23:48, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

As any experienced writer is aware, one always considers cognitive load in light of the intended audience of a written work. Indeed, so considering your most recent talk page comment as a written work and me as the intended audience, why did you feel the need to tell me your college coursework, your editing schedule, and the name of some banned editor I have never heard of before and surely do not care about? I do not think you are achieving the cognitive load minimization that you are striving for, either on this talk page or in the article text. Einsof (talk) 01:54, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

Keep in mind that many if not most people reading this article by definition will not be familiar with the MUTCD, civil engineering, or standardization. The difference is the MUTCD is public domain and the text is readily available for anyone.

@Einsof, I'm afraid that ChatGPT or some LLM was used for the reply. – The Grid (talk) 12:36, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

@User:The Grid: That is a false statement and defamation per se. I demand an apology.

Please refresh your memory on Wikipedia:Civility. Also, the current public domain nature of the MUTCD is completely irrelevant. We are discussing the portion of the article covering the historical ad hoc standardization process before the Feds got involved.

One of the things that everyone who studies history of science and technology learns very fast is that the United States is considered at the international level to be a bizarre outlier because of its nasty habit of running standardization through an alphabet soup of private organizations like ANSI, NEMA, ICC, NFPA, IETF, W3C, etc., while NIST remains toothless compared to its counterparts elsewhere. NIST's reputation was damaged further when metrication in the United States went completely off the rails. ANSI has a Standards Portal which celebrates the "decentralized" American approach in glowing terms, without acknowledging that the rest of the world thinks ANSI is weird.

The MUTCD drafting process originally involved state and local government officials participating in private associations and the MUTCD did not become a public domain FHWA document until much later. In contrast, the Canadian MUTCD is still copyrighted and nearly impossible to access (yes, I've tried) because the Canadian federal government never took over the Canadian MUTCD from the TAC.

Come to think of it, your confusion on this point is actually a good thing. It made me realize that the current version of the WP article lacks this critical contextual information and fails to explain how the MUTCD evolved from a private standardization process. I'll have to look for sources on that point and add them to the article.

@Einsof: When you make ad hominem attacks like that, the reasonable inference is that you have no valid direct response on the merits.

It's rich to call another writer condescending when I'm not the one assuming the reader already knows everything. No, a good writer assumes they don't know and tries to make it clear what they are trying to understand.

Years ago, as a young man, I did try for a while to strike up conversations with ordinary people about standardization and the importance of uniform standards for everything when I was studying history of science and technology in college. It is amazing how quickly their eyes glaze over or they start to run away from you. The interesting thing is that you don't seem to grasp the obscurity of the subject. So when you say, "I don't know what kind of reader you are envisioning", that's right. You don't know. --Coolcaesar (talk) 17:22, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

Civility is a two way street and WP:BOOMERANG applies. Your attitude is this discussion is not warranted at all. I would assume you're human when you don't need to make a page reply with something so basic.

You can't provide a basic source of your description? Otherwise, it could be easily be challenged as original research. This is a primary Wikipedia policy. – The Grid (talk) 17:58, 2 September 2025 (UTC)

Well, I have to be this wordy because it is required by the WP civility policy.

I was much more concise when I was younger. Through painful experience, I have found that being concise on WP talk pages just makes people angry. They can't read my mind as to what's wrong with their bad writing. Then I get wrongly accused of being uncivil, when I was just trying to save a couple of minutes. So now I have to head off such accusations by taking the time to frame the issue in dispute, which is exactly what I did above.

To directly respond to your point, you're changing the subject. Above, I was challenging how User:Einsof was deleting valid information necessary to a clear understanding of why and how two manuals became one. Now you're wrongly accusing me of original research, apparently because you did not follow the link to the source already cited in the article.

To be clear, I drafted the first passage above to paraphrase this passage in the cited source (again, at page A-1, page 97 of the PDF): "Despite its name, pavement markings were not addressed in the document. In the earliest days of traffic control devices, some types of signs were referred to as road markers and this creates confusion with pavement markings."

Let's get back to the core issue. Again, it makes no sense to say that "the difference is the MUTCD is public domain and the text is readily available for anyone." Again, we're talking about a passage in the article describing the MUTCD at a point long before it became a public domain government publication. It was a private publication, like any other privately published standard.

The current version of this WP article fails to describe the complex and tortuous process (which I have seen mentioned elsewhere in various reports, scholarly articles and on some web pages) by which the MUTCD eventually came under FHWA jurisdiction. I never added those details because I simply haven't had the time, energy or interest to investigate what happened with the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 and understand exactly why the Joint Committee got so screwed up in the 1970s. Since it's becoming clear from this discussion that the complex private/public hybrid nature of the MUTCD is causing a lot of confusion among people unfamiliar with the subtleties of its history, I'll have to move that up my priority list and add those details over the next year or so. --Coolcaesar (talk) 15:04, 4 September 2025 (UTC)