Dollar signs were too high

Charlottesville Daily Progress
Published: April 10, 2008

What is it with signage in Charlottesville?
Every few years, someone proposes redoing the city’s signs, as if it were a fresh and inventive idea. Better signage would boost business, bring more tourists downtown, encourage shoppers to linger by making it easy for them to find their way around.
Well, yes, it would. But at what cost?
Recollection of having lived through disappointing experiments in the past may or may not be part of City Council’s decision to reduce its commitment to a new signage program.
But the sheer expense of new signs was certainly a part of that rationale.
There is already $200,000 in the current budget for signs, and another $250,000 is planned to be spent in the 2009 budget. City staff had requested an additional $500,000 for signage in 2010 and 2011.
Council wisely said “no.”
“I’m confident that with the money we have now … we can accomplish [our] goals… ,” said Mayor David Norris.
The new sign design certainly looks attractive.
But, then, so have past designs. Sometimes designs look good on paper, but then don’t perform well on site.
Not only is design a factor in functionality, but so is quantity. The city needs signs that are at once accurate, easy to read and adequately distributed.
It’s frustrating for a tourist to see a sign pointing the way toward a destination, only to lose the trail because there are no additional markers. And a frustrated tourist hardly can be expected to turn into a great emissary for the city.
Design that’s not only readable but attractive, and signs that are not only convenient but frequent, all add to costs.
But with revenue flattening and needs rising, $1 million on new signage was a steep price — too steep a price. Council was right to say “no.”

Satisfied — but safe?

Higher cost doesn’t always mean higher quality.
Then again …
Low-cost airlines AirTran, Jet Blue and Southwest took the top three spots in a national survey of quality, while in last place were Comair, American Eagle and Atlantic Southeast Airlines.
Overall, last year was the worst ever for U.S. airlines, according to Brent Bowen, a co-author of the study on quality and a professor at the Aviation Institute at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The annual Airline Quality Rating survey found that more bags were lost, more passengers were bumped, more consumers complained and fewer flights arrived on time than in 2006.
Southwest had the fewest complaints of all.
But Southwest has just been accused of flying unsafe aircraft. Federal Aviation Administration documents allege that at least 117 planes took to the air in violation of mandatory safety checks. In some cases, the planes flew for 2½ years after missing government inspection deadlines.
If true, the gap between safety and consumer satisfaction would be a glaring imbalance — and a reminder that just because something looks good doesn’t mean that it is.