Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President

As I have may have mentioned before, I have a long commute to work every day. On average, I spend a good 2 hours each day in the car, roundtrip. This gives me a lot of time to think about various things... from my exciting life to the state of Illinois roadways. I spend an awful lot of time, in fact, on the latter.

One of the three roadways I take, I-88, is undergoing construction. The signs claim it is a "rebuild-widen" project, and I think that is supposed to make me feel better about the giant clusterfuck this constructions has caused on what used to be a smoothly run tollway. One of the first things they did in the 'rebuild-widen' clusterfuck project was install an electronic roadsign, much like the one seen in this photo. The one on the I-88, or the Regan as it is now called, spans the width of the highway. When I first saw that this was going up I thought it was an outstanding idea, even if I was a little bit annoyed with how much traffic it caused. I figured the sign could provide useful information, such as travel times, or, in the event of an emergency, evacuation information, like the one in the photo.

I overestimated the Illinois Department of Transportation in assuming it would want to use those costly signs to provide useful information for travelers. In fact, I would guess that on one out of every 30 days that sign displays useful information such as travel times. The other 29 days, it displays one of three messages:

• U Drink, U Drive, U Lose

• Click-it or ticket

• Trucks take a longer time to stop. Please keep a safe distance away.

Not only is that first one annoying because it is written like a text message, but it, like the other messages, is a completely obvious piece of advice that could have been conveyed without spending millions of dollars on materials and construction crews and causing a lot more traffic than even an expert like me would have anticipated. Click-it or ticket? That is the one message the Illinois Department of Transportation wants to give me in the one second it has my attention? Are you fucking kidding me?

I am not here simply to rant about the useless information provided by those costly signs; I have a suggestion for how to improve the situation. If IDOT refuses to display useful traffic information, which I still maintain is the most obvious use for a sign that spans the width of a highway, I suggest using the sign to display information that the average American should have. Maybe IDOT should get its hands on the US Constitution and display things like the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Or during Black History month, the sign could display information about important black people*. Frankly, I could come up with a million more interesting messages to display on the sign. How about a word of the day? Or a random fact about a famous Illinois resident? Or the cost of a ticket for speeding in a construction zone? Really anything other than U Drink U Drive U Lose would make me happy.

If you were in charge of the electronic road signs, what would you display?

*Well, I guess they could provide that information any time really, but you get my drift.