Southbound along a newly opened stretch of freeway near Boca Raton in 1977, again courtesy Michael Summa. In the great route decommissioning, Sample Rd. survived to become FL 834 (instead of a county route). What's cooler, the button copy or the five-digit shield?


NB past a Florida peculiary into the only significant stretch of button copy left in the state. That's why I cut off Exit 48A so rudely - it's all about the button copy, baby! Give FDOT time, and they could turn a section of FL 869 back to the county (it happens throughout the state with many reversals), and then you'd have three shields for the same road. That doesn't mean they all need to be on the same sign.


More NB Boca Raton button copy, with the last sign on the Exit 50 ramp. Exit 50 was 40C, which is what was replaced in the Park & Ride photo.


Finishing up the NB button copy run from Exit 51 to 42. Wait, what? This is what all the foreshadowing was about. This could be the last sign in Florida where FDOT forgot to renumber the exit from sequential to mile-based. It should be Exit 52, not 42 (FL 806). And to think, I just took the photo because it looked like yet another version of the Turnpike trailblazer.


Northbound in 1977, again courtesy Michael Summa; with the renumbering from sequential to mileage-based exits, these are now Exits 66 and 68.


This is what happens when you have a highway engineer do sign design. Highway engineers are good at following directions precisely, which leads to the following:
1) Improper spacing between elements. All of the letters and numbers in the exit tabs are too close together. That can happen by using the defaults in whatever software program, but proper design goes letter by letter to ensure proper spacing.
2) Improper sign dimensions. There's not enough green space on the outside of the sign - it should be equal to the upper case letter height. This particularly manifests itself on the left and right of the exit tabs and the FL 706 lines.
3) Improper font specifications. When a font says 16"/12", that refers to a single font, wherein the capital letter is 16" tall and the lower case letters are nominally 12" tall (excluding letters with tails like k, h, b, and t). Someone not used to sign design would use the lower case letters assigned to a 12" font, which would actually end up making them 9" tall, which results in this. Using the proper font size for Okeechobee would have forced a wider sign, curing the width issues.


Heading north and looking west at the setting sun, then trying to capture sign photos at dusk - not easy from a moving car. The CR 708 shield looks like a New York style and doesn't match anything else in Florida. The ugly 713 is hardly more like it, though. Between those dusk photos, I've stuck in a few more recent ones where they fall geographically - a new overpass ready for a needed extra lane each way on I-95, an HAR sign that should be in all caps with a bottom black border instead of white, and a poorly drawn shield at FL 76.


Bad capitalization and two grainy dusky photos. The first is NB and lets you make out that CR 714 is on a white-background shield next to FL 714 - one of the many routes that switches jurisdiction randomly. Florida has strict caps on state mileage limits, so taking over one road means letting go at least part of another, and they did that wholesale in the 1980s. The last photo is coincidentally also a white-background shield, leaving Tradition Field, the spring training home of the New York Mets.


Speaking of "ready for a needed extra lane" two captions ago, Florida is getting right on that. Hopefully sign replacement will be part of the project as well.


NB button copy that was only recently replaced, courtesy Costa Ioannidis.


Southbound down to the end of the FL 60 ramp (now Exit 147) courtesy Michael Summa, first in 1982 with the patched-on colored shield (nice touch) and I-shield (when Thru Traffic doesn't cut it), and then at the bottom of the ramp in 1976, when I-95 was still incomplete along the stretch that parallels Florida's Turnpike. All the arrows point to the left for a reason - I-95 is temporarily signed along the Turnpike until the freeway picks up again in Miami Gardens. Of course, Florida also profited from this detour. See the Turnpike page for more from the detour, link at bottom.


Plenty more widening construction, starting at Exit 138, and leaving off somewhere around Exit 147, which is still the only Vero Beach exit. I imagine there will be a new one within my lifetime.

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Exit 39 to FL 834
Exit 42 (52) or 65 (147) to Florida's Turnpike
Exit 50 (68) to US 98
Exit 65 (147) to FL 60
Exit 65 (147) to FL A1A
Exit 65 (147) to US 1
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