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.
Stories
Road signs, small towns, and why the number on your hometown sign is probably wrong.
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.