alt Hacker NewsThere Are over 1M New York City Street Signs. Here's How They Are Made.
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Behind the scenes infrastructure articles like this are so interesting to me.
Complex systems that are based in physicality rather than software.
Very cool and pretty amazing it requires only 46 people. My software team is about that size and I feel like 70k street signs a year is a lot more work than what we accomplish in a year...
>"The sign shop, which is part of the New York City Department of Transportation, has a staff of 46 workers, including seven letterers who lay out signs by hand and a blacksmith who makes custom brackets to securely attach signs to traffic poles."
This is one of the things I truly love about NYC. Any other city would have outsourced this operation to some third world sweatshop or massive corporation. Instead you have a whole crew of local tenured high quality jobs with good benefits run by citizens of the city.
https://wallhop.io/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/15/nyregi...