Rachel Noyes often laughs at her own jokes, but in her defense, it’s hard not to laugh when you’re driving along I-89 and the traffic sign is telling you to “Camp in the woods / Not in the left lane.”
Plenty of signs like that have popped up on Vermont’s interstates in recent years — “If you hate tickets / Raise your right foot,” for example, or “Visiting inlaws? / Slow down, be late” — that gently remind you not to drive like a maniac but are also objectively hilarious. Noyes ought to know, she wrote them.
“The thing that’s so great about this is I submit a lot of these and when I’m on the highway and I see these, I laugh,” Noyes said. “I think they’re so great.”
The outreach manager with the state highway safety office, Noyes is one half of a writer’s room in the Vermont Agency of Transportation. Together with Ryan Knapp, the agency’s Intelligent Transportation System chief, they’re tasked with coming up with messages to flash to drivers as they’re motoring along the interstate. The two have been crafting the puns since at least 2020.
The paramount purpose of the message boards is to enhance highway safety in real time, Knapp says. That means alerting drivers that there’s a crash ahead, or that there may be black ice on the road, or that there’s snow on the ground and you don’t want to have to call a wrecker to pull your car out of a ditch.
They pair with national safety campaigns put forth by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which has an annual calendar of enforcement campaigns specifically for occupant protection, or impaired driving, for example. They work with local and state law enforcement as well.
But over the years, the pair has written their own puns and jokes to time with the holidays, cultural events or the changing seasons, and they’ve become immensely popular. A Reddit thread posted last year showcased some of people’s favorites:
• “No Valentine? / Your seat belt will hold you.”
• “You may sparkle / But don’t drive lit.”
• “90 is the temperature / Not the speed limit.”
The agency in 2021 put on a contest to solicit feedback and ask for public submissions, and Knapp and Noyes said they were flooded with one-liners — which quickly became a lot to manage.
“We got a lot of submissions,” Noyes said. “People got really excited about it.”
They must work within certain boundaries, of course. The messages get approved by agency leadership. And it’s much harder than it looks, given there’s a limited amount of space on the message boards.
But the mission remains the same — urge people to be safe and smart on the road. Theoretically, people will see the joke, will have a good laugh, remember the joke, and then, either consciously or subconsciously, take their foot off the pedal.
“People get numb if it’s just the same dry message over and over again, which I think is a great argument for the humorous and the pop culture messages, because just anecdotally speaking, it’s generating a lot of conversations,” Knapp said. “We hear coworkers talking about it. We hear family members talking about it. We see it all over social media. So, in my mind, the proof is in the pudding: We have people talking about highway safety.”
But the party might be over. In December, the Federal Highway Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, released an updated 1,100-page manual that spells out how signs and other traffic control devices are regulated. In its regulations, the agency strongly recommended against overhead electronic signs intended to be funny.
Traffic signs, the federal government said, should be “simple, direct, brief, legible and clear.”
In the following weeks, dozens of news outlets across the country reported on the new guidelines, with outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press reporting on the federal government’s ban on fun.
But the agency later clarified that, no, the federal government has not declared that there Shall Be No Fun. Their recommendation is to avoid humorous messages “because it may confuse or distract drivers.”
Messages should “fulfill a need; command attention; convey a clear, simple message; command respect; and provide adequate time for proper response,” a spokesperson said.
Knapp and Noyes say the agency is convening a committee to consider all the changes that they will need to meet to comply with the new regulations. The new guidance gives a two-year window to make changes.
It’s unclear for now how they’ll proceed — Knapp said that the agency supports the funny messaging. But he added that they’ll work with their federal partners “to better understand what we need to do to stay in compliance and remain in compliance.”
For now, Knapp and Noyes said it’s their hope that they’ll continue writing their puns.
“There are so many contentious issues in this world and perceived outrage and everything else. This is a way for us to relate to the everyday road user,” Knapp said. “We’re not the big bad government, we’re people just like you, you know, we have families, we have kids, we have jobs, we drive on the roads and we want to get home safe, just like everyone else.”
