Eligible voting members of the Southern District may now go online and vote for 2017 officers.

The NC Department of Transportation's Rail Division and the NC Triangle Chapter of the Women's Transportation Seminar will host the 2016 Southeast Rail Forum in Charlotte on March 16-18 to discuss ongoing freight and passenger rail initiatives in the Southeast Region, which includes Washington, D.C.; Virginia; North Carolina; South Carolina; Georgia, and Florida.

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) recently published a notice in the Federal Register that Clearview, an experimental font (shown above on the left; Highway Gothic is on the right) - for which it gave conditional use approval starting in 2004 - will not be approved for use on public roads after February 23.

In an article on Transportation.gov, Gregory Nadeau of FHWA provided some reasons for the change - after a decade of research, Clearview has not been shown to improve legibility at nighttime or among older drivers. "Early successes we noted were credited to the new font, but the years since have shown those successes were likely due, at least in part, to the fact that older, worn signs had been replaced with new, cleaner ones using brighter materials," he writes. "After more than a decade of analysis, 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."

The designers of Clearview, in an interview with online news aggregator Quartz, expressed sadness and frustration that the experiment was ending. "It is fair to say that this has never been approached as a systematic design effort and designers are not part of the equation-as it was when Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert redesigned the road signs in 1964 in the UK," said graphic designer Donald Meeker.

Read about the history of Clearview in this CityLab article, and the notice in the Federal Register is here.