The new font, for example, is on the large green “guide” signs that warn motorists of approaching exits along Interstate 89 between White River Junction and Royalton. That project, which has periodically backed up traffic, has been ongoing since April and is set to wrap up soon.

Only one interstate sign project that is part of a statewide revamp targeting those large guide signs is left to be completed. But that stretch of Interstate 91, from Springfield to Hartford, won’t have signs with the new font, Gamble said.

That’s because the feds in January — after researching the new font for more than a decade — determined that Clearview in certain cases “showed no benefit” or actually “degraded sign legibility,” according to the Federal Register’s January notice announcing the FHWA was scrapping its study on Clearview.

The agency “rescind(ed) the use of letter styles” other than the Standard Highway Font.

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

Despite the backspace, Gamble said not to worry.

“The new signs are far more legible than the old signs,” Gamble said, noting that many of the older signs that were replaced date back to when the interstates were built and were worn.

“Whether they are as good as if replaced with the standard highway font, I don’t know,” she added.

She said she hasn’t heard any feedback about the font from motorists.

“People don’t really notice it,” she said.

According to the Federal Register’s 2004 notice announcing “interim approval” for the optional use of Clearview, the feds said the font would, among other things, improve legibility for older drivers.

The Clearview font enlarges the height and width of lower-case letters, FHWA spokesman Neil Gaffney said in an email on Thursday.

Clearview font was supposed to make lowercase e, a and s’s more visible, because in Highway Gothic they can appear to be a lowercase “o” in the glare of headlights, The Atlantic reported in January.

“By opening up these letterforms, and mixing lowercase and uppercase styles, Clearview aimed to improve how these reflective highway signs read,” The Atlantic reported.

About 30 states switched to the font, that news agency reported.

But according to the Federal Register notice, the study found that the “brightness of the retroreflective sheeting is the primary factor in nighttime legibility,” not the font.

“In this particular case, there is no benefit of the alternative method that cannot be similarly achieved within the established practice,” the FHWA notice said. “In many cases, the established practice actually demonstrated benefits that the alternative could not achieve.”

Although the FHWA has ditched Clearview, states that adopted the new font won’t be ordered to change the signs.

Therefore, Vermont’s new signs will stay, said Paul Perry, resident engineer for the recent Interstate 89 sign project.

That project, which used Clearview and came at a price tag of $1.7 million, is 99 percent complete, he said, and is scheduled to wrap up by the end of the month.

The only Vermont interstate sign project yet to be completed — along Interstate 91 in southern Windsor County — has been sent back to the drawing tables.

The initial plans had the guide signs using the Clearview font, Gamble said, but that has since changed.

On that stretch, new signs with Highway Gothic font will be installed, though the project is a year or two out, she said.

(The Clearview font was only used on interstate guide signs, so speed limit and other warning signs weren’t affected. The FHWA study focused on signs with lighter letters on a darker background.)

Across the river, New Hampshire officials didn’t run into the problems that Vermont officials did.

New Hampshire Department of Transportation spokesman Bill Boynton said officials in Concord never adopted the use of Clearview font in the first place.

He said the font is proprietary, so the state would have had to pay a small fee for the rights to use it, like Vermont did.

“We don’t like to pay for things in New Hampshire,” Boynton joked.