[audio:http://www.wdde.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/signsdel.mp3|titles= Delaware Public Media's Tom Byrne and contributor Larry Nagengast discuss Delaware's highway signage.]
Looking for the First State National Monument? If you’re driving on an interstate highway in Delaware – or on Route 1 or Route 13, you won’t find any signs to help you get to the historic sites in New Castle or Dover. Fortunately, when you get to either downtown area, you’ll have a good idea that you have arrived.
Looking for the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Milton, one of a dozen stops on the Delaware Tourism Office’s Wine & Ale Trail? It’s good that almost everyone in coastal Sussex knows where it is, because you won’t see any signs on the highway to help you find your way.
What about the Harvest Ridge Winery in Marydel? Unlike Dogfish Head, it’s not a stop on the Wine & Ale Trail and, without signage, it isn’t easy to find. “It’s a hike out there,” says Cindy Small, executive director of the Kent County and Greater Dover Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We’ve gotten calls. People tell us they thought they had driven past it, so they turned around and went back. Some said they eventually found it.”
From Claymont to Delmar, motorists will see plenty of signs — more than 300,000 maintained by the state Department of Transportation and hundreds of others that are the responsibility of local governments, according to Mark Luszcz, DelDOT’s chief traffic engineer.
But, if you ask Small and Sarah Willoughby, executive director at the Greater Wilmington Convention and Visitors Bureau, those signs don’t do a great job of helping travelers find the state’s historic, cultural and recreational attractions.
“The issue is larger than just one sign or one attraction,” says Linda Parkowski, director of the Tourism Office. “It’s large and it’s major.”
A common refrain from travelers who have driven on Interstate 95, Willoughby says, is “I had no idea what Delaware has” to offer tourists.
“You’d like to think that people in Delaware know where they’re going,” Small says, “but people from outside Delaware don’t — and half the people in Delaware don’t know either.”
It’s a problem for which there are no easy answers. “The goal is to have a consistent, comprehensive signage program,” Parkowski says, but “you just don’t wave a magic wand and have the signs appear on Route 1.”
There are no villains in this story, but the big challenge facing DelDOT and the tourism advocates lies in determining the best approaches while remaining in compliance with the 392-page signage section of the state’s Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, regulations created by the Federal Highway Administration and modified, when permissible, to cover situations specific to Delaware.
“We cannot stray from the manual very far. We can’t change their hard requirements. In some areas we have leeway, in others we can do as we choose,” Luszcz says. Sometimes, he adds, when DelDOT is asked why it cannot do something, “we don’t have a good answer other than ‘they said so.’”
The manual’s signage section covers all sorts of markers, including the ones officials call “green signs” (usually directional), “brown signs” for historic, cultural and recreational attractions, and “blue signs,” pointing the way to the restaurants, hotels and gas stations (but not museums and tourism destinations) that pay annual fees to have their logos shown on them.
But the manual also requires highway officials to follow priorities. Signs that are essential to the primary purpose of highways — moving vehicles safely and efficiently — are considered the most important. Directional signs near exits, regulatory signs (speed limits, for example) and warning signs (curves and merges) take precedence over tourism or other supplemental guide signs, Luszcz says. In addition, there are rules governing how far apart signs must be placed, in order to avoid “sign clutter.”
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That problem is especially severe along I-95 near Wilmington, close to the attractions that the Greater Wilmington Convention & Visitors Bureau works to promote.
Willoughby would like to see signs on I-95 advising motorists of which exit to take to reach destinations like the Delaware Art Museum, Winterthur, Hagley Museum, Longwood Gardens, the Wilmington Riverfront, the Grand Opera House and hotels in downtown Wilmington. Heading south of Wilmington, she notes, there are signs pointing toward the casino and racetrack at Delaware Park, hotels in the Newark area and the University of Delaware’s athletic complex.
Sorry, Luczsz says, but there’s no room for such signage.
Russ Smith, superintendent of the First State National Monument, has been seeking signage directing motorists toward the monument’s attractions in New Castle since its creation a little more than a year ago. Finally, he says, DelDOT has agreed to install a sign on I-95 southbound, near the Route 141 exit. “They told me there’s no place to put one going northbound,” Smith says.
Smaller signs will be posted on the Route 9 and Route 273 approaches to New Castle.
But there is one hitch, Smith adds. “I have to look for a grant to pay for them.”
That’s right – if an organization requests signage to indicate its location, it has to pay for it, Luczsz says. That includes other state agencies as well. For example, if a new sign is needed for a state park, the Division of Parks and Recreation picks up the tab, not DelDOT.
[caption id="attachment_27314" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Sign for the Go Ape zip line course at Lums Pond State Park cannot include Go Ape corporate name under current sign rules."] 
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That leads us to another quirk in the rules. When the Go Ape zip line course opened last summer at Lums Pond State Park, tourism and parks officials wanted to promote the attraction with additional signage. Go Ape, however, is a for-profit operation that has contracted with the state to run the zip line facility, and the regulations do not permit identifying for-profit businesses on the brown signs that are used to denote state parks and museums.
The result: signs near Lums Pond mention the zip line attraction, but they don’t say Go Ape.
That same regulation has kept the state from installing signs to promote attractions on one of Parkowski’s favorite initiatives, the statewide Wine & Ale Trail. “We’ve got wineries. We’re known for our breweries. We’re fortunate to have Dogfish Head in Milton. We’d love to be able to promote them,” she says.
One option for promoting for-profit ventures are the large blue signs found near the exits and on the exit ramps of limited access highways that locate nearby hotels, restaurants and gas stations. The state has outsourced the program to a private vendor, who recruits the businesses that pay an annual fee to have their logos posted on the signs. When the agreement was made 10 or 12 years ago, Parkowski says, tourist attractions and museums were excluded from participation.
The contract expires later this year. When a request for proposal is issued to solicit a new program manager, Parkowski would like to see the program opened to tourist attractions and museums. Luszcz says that option will be considered.
If the rules are changed to permit museums to use the blue signs, the museums would have to come up with the money to pay for them. Both Willoughby and Small expressed interest in working with the state to create a grant program to help nonprofits offset some of the cost.
Another set of signs, installed about 10 years ago mostly along Kennett Pike, Route 100 and Concord Pike west and north of Wilmington, pose a different sort of problem. These signs, developed by the Chester County (Pa.) Conference and Visitors Bureau with the support of its Greater Wilmington and Delaware County (Pa.) counterparts, direct travelers to multiple Brandywine Valley attractions.
[caption id="attachment_27314" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Signs for Brandywine Valley attractions fail to meet federal standards and will not be replaced if damaged to taken down."] 
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These signs, with white print on a black background, don’t meet federal standards for retro-reflectivity (a measure of how well light is reflected back from the sign at night), their directional arrows are not properly placed, and they lack a “breakaway” design, which makes them more dangerous if struck by a moving vehicle, Luszcz says.
Although the signs are not up to standards, they are not being taken down. However, if any of these signs are damaged or must be taken down because of a highway construction process, they will not be replaced.
While some signs on Delaware highways are out of compliance, others don’t seem to be doing the job well, Small says.
As examples, she points to the brown signs on Route 1 and Route 13 in the Dover area that help motorists find the State Police Museum and the Delaware Agriculture Museum.
One sign features a profile image of a state trooper, the other shows an old-fashioned plow.
“It’s almost like a guessing game,” Small says. “What does the head of a state trooper mean? A lot of people think it’s for a police station. What does the plow mean? It doesn’t make you think of a museum.”
Luszcz and Parkowski are meeting regularly to discuss signage issues but they do not have a timeline for concluding their discussions. Nothing significant is likely to happen during this year’s vacation season, they say, but improvements for next year are possible.
“When you drive in Delaware,” Parkowski says, “you should know that when you see a large blue sign with the state logo on the top, you’ll get information about lodging, gas, food or some other attraction, no matter whether it’s public or private, and you’ll know you’ll be able to get off at the next exit and find your way from there.”