Same green sign, different rules in every state
California law puts population and altitude on the sign. Colorado skips the population. Massachusetts doesn't even use green. Here's who does what.
Stories
Road signs, small towns, and why the number on your hometown sign is probably wrong.
249 towns say they're the capital of the world
Five towns claim to be the Watermelon Capital of the World. Three claim horseradish. The one place none of them can say it is the city limit sign.
Your hometown's sign has a part number, and it depends who you ask
The federal sign manual files your city limit sign under I2-1. Missouri calls it I4-1, which in the federal book is the sign for a library.
Our most common town name isn't Springfield
Out of the 19,496 towns we carry, Franklin shows up in 25 states. Springfield, the name The Simpsons picked for being everywhere, is in 16.
Some towns will change their name for the right offer
Hot Springs became Truth or Consequences for a radio show. Clark became DISH for free TV. A few towns took the deal, and the sign changed with them.
Why your city limit sign lights up at night
A city limit sign has no bulbs and no wires, but it lights up in your headlights. That's glass beads, tiny prisms, and somebody's night job.
Half the towns on our shirts got smaller
We checked the population on every shirt we sell against the Census Bureau's latest estimates. Most of the towns that shrank are small ones.
The longest drive between two town signs in the lower 48
We put coordinates on all 19,413 towns and measured the gap to each one's nearest neighbor. The average American town has another one 5.8 miles away. Ely, Nevada has 110.
Our shirts are a time capsule and we're not fixing them
The population numbers we print are from a late-2000s Census pull. We've decided to leave them there, and it isn't laziness. Those numbers are a record of something that's being erased.
Colorado decided your population wasn't the state's business
Drive into a Colorado town and the sign tells you how high you are, not how many people live there. The state worked out sixty years ago what the rest of the country just got around to.
Why your town might not have a city limit sign
Some places never get a sign, and it isn't an oversight. If nobody ever incorporated the town, there's no legal boundary to mark and no government with standing to mark it.
Half the towns we print have fewer than a thousand people
We counted our own catalog. Of 19,494 towns, 9,285 have under a thousand residents and 1,098 have fewer than a hundred. The smallest has one, and she's the mayor.
The federal government banned a font, and Congress un-banned it
Clearview was approved for road signs in 2004, terminated in 2016, and brought back in 2018 by an act of Congress. The FHWA still won't say it likes it.
The population is coming off the city limit signs
State DOTs have started dropping population counts from city limit signs. The ones still standing keep their numbers until the sign wears out, and then that's it.
Why your hometown sign is green and not some other color
Green isn't a design choice. It's a federal color code, and it means one specific thing: this sign is here to help you, not to boss you around.