Some anonymous guerrilla urban planner has planted nearly 600 "undocumented stop signs" in the town of Cranston, RI. A special town government committee has elected to keep all but 21 stop signs and 2 yield signs — apparently, the unknown freelancer put her or his stop signs in places that really needed them. The town council still needs to approve the committee's findings.
A similar ordinance was proposed last June, but the city council rejected it 5-4, with the majority saying it was not willing to authorize the signs in bulk without gathering further information. Three city workers were then assigned to drive around and look at 2,595 signs and checking each one against a map to determine which were the 1,903 that had been officially approved. The mayor's office presented its report in November. Assuming the three sign-checkers started this project in July and finished at the end of October, that's about seven signs per day per person. It's tempting to say that this is not a very impressive rate, but I imagine they were all going a little crazy by sign number two-thousand…
A city official said they believed that the mystery signs had been put up by "housing developments over the years" that had not followed the right protocol to codify the signs. Translation: they have no idea. I prefer to think that they all just appeared one night, like crop circles, and so that's the explanation I'm going with.
UPDATE: City to Legitimize Mystery Stop Signs, Report Says
(Image: Stop Sign, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 54409200@N04's photostream)
