In Artist’s Freeway Prank, Form Followed Function

Transit: Unauthorized addition to sign went unnoticed for months. No charges planned. By HUGO MARTÍN LA Times Staff Writer

May 9 2002

What more could an artist want?

An unusual medium. A chance to take a jab at the establishment. An almost endless audience, speeding to see the work.

Richard Ankrom created that enviable milieu above an unlikely canvas–the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.

For two years, the rail-thin artist planned and prepared for his most ambitious project, a piece that would be seen by more than 150,000 motorists per day on the freeway, near 3rd Street.

With friends documenting his every move on camera, Ankrom clandestinely installed the finished product on a gray August morning. For nine months, no one noticed. It even failed to catch the eye of California Department of Transportation officials

And that is exactly what Ankrom hoped for.

The 46-year-old Los Angeles artist designed, built and installed an addition to an overhead freeway sign–to exact state specifications–to help guide motorists on the sometimes confusing transition to the northbound Golden State Freeway a couple miles farther north.

He installed his handiwork in broad daylight, dressed in a hard hat and orange reflective vest to avoid raising suspicion. He even chopped off his shoulder-length blond hair to fit the role of a blue-collar freeway worker.

The point of the project, said Ankrom, was to show that art has a place in modern society–even on a busy, impersonal freeway. He also wanted to prove that one highly disciplined individual can make a difference.

Embarrassed Caltrans officials, who learned of the bogus sign from a local newspaper column, concede that the sign could be a help. They will leave it in place, for now. The transportation agency doesn’t plan to press charges, for trespassing or tampering with state property.

Why didn’t the counterfeit sign get noticed?

“The experts are saying that Mr. Ankrom did a fantastic job,” conceded Caltrans spokeswoman Jeanne Bonfilio. “They thought it was an internal job.”

Ankrom’s work has also won praise from some in the art world.

Mat Gleason, publisher of the Los Angeles art magazine Coagula, learned about the project a few months ago. He calls it “terrific” because it shows that art can “benefit people and at the same time tweak the bureaucracy a little.”

The idea for the sign came to Ankrom back in 1999, when he found himself repeatedly getting lost trying to find the ramp to the north Golden State after the Harbor becomes the Pasadena Freeway. (The sharp left-lane exit sneaks up on drivers at the end of a series of four tunnels.)

He thought about complaining to Caltrans. But he figured his suggestion would get lost in the huge state bureaucracy. Instead, Ankrom decided to take matters into his own hands by adding a simple “North 5” to an existing sign.

“It needed to be done,” he said from his downtown loft. “It’s not like it was something that was intentionally wrong.”

It didn’t hurt that his work is displayed before 150,000 people daily. On an average day, even the Louvre gets only one-tenth that many visitors. He also didn’t mind that his “guerrilla public service” made Caltrans look a bit foolish. “They are left with egg on their faces,” he said.

Ankrom had planned to wait until August–a year after the installation–to reveal his forgery via video at an art show. But a photographer friend leaked the story.

>From his tiny Brewery Art Complex loft, Ankrom said he tries to use his work
to comment on current trends. The Seattle native fabricates hatchets embedded with roses and produces neon-illuminated laser guns. To pay the bills, he is also a freelance sign maker.

The expertise he gained in both fields helped him pull off the perfect counterfeit job.

He closely studied existing freeway signs, matching color swatches and downloading specifications from the Federal Highway Administration’s Web site.

His biggest challenge was finding reflective buttons resembling those on Interstate signs–a dilemma finally resolved when he discovered a replica sold by a company in Tacoma, Wash.

The video he made of the entire process shows Ankrom snapping digital photos of existing Golden State Freeway signs and projecting the images onto paper, before tracing them onto a sheet of aluminum. He cut and painted the aluminum sign and even “aged” it with a layer of gray.

Ankrom affixed a contractor-style logo on the side of his pickup truck to add authenticity during the project. But closer examination might have raised suspicions. It read: Aesthetic De Construction.

He even printed up a bogus work order, just in case he was stopped by police.”I tried to make this airtight, because I didn’t want anything to go wrong,” he said.

In early August, Ankrom launched the final phase of his project. After friends were in place with video and still cameras, one gave the all-clear signal via walkie-talkie: “Move in rubber ducky.”

He made short work of the final installation–climbing up the sign and hanging over speeding traffic to install his addition. The main challenge was avoiding the razor wire on the way up.

Ankrom said he’s not surprised that Caltrans isn’t pressing charges, adding, “It wasn’t straight-out vandalism.”

For now, department officials say they will merely inspect the elements of Ankrom’s sign to make sure they are securely fastened. They may be replaced in a few months as part of a program to retrofit all freeway signs with new, highly reflective models.

Caltrans officials had discussed adding more directional signs, but the agency spokeswoman said she is not sure why the department never followed through.

Ankrom said he would like Caltrans to return the work. “If they want to keep it up there, that is fine too,” he said. “Hopefully it will help people out, which was the whole point.”

Tuesday August 21 10:17 AM ET

At Last! Silicon Valley Drivers Find the Fast Lane

By Michael Kahn

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – It took a dot-com bust, a stock market swoon and tens of thousands of layoffs, but Silicon Valley drivers are — finally — enjoying life in the fast lane.

Take the highway south from San Francisco to the heart of Silicon Valley, past the high-tech headquarters of such industry giants as Intel and Applied Materials, and you’ll find the commute time has shriveled in the past few months.

And while the heady days of soaring share prices and IPO riches may be a distant memory, so too are the choked highways, blaring horns and crawling traffic that commuters said made driving to work a nightmare experience.

“The traffic now moves around 80 miles-per-hour but before it used to be more of a crawl,” said Steve Faig, a finance manager at Applied Materials. He said his 45-mile commute from San Francisco to Santa Clara now takes about an hour compared to twice that a year and a half ago.

State traffic officials hesitate to pin the free-flowing traffic on any one factor, noting that the summer vacation period is often lighter than other times of year and that a new ”fast trak” electronic toll system was helping to cut toll plaza bottlenecks.

A DOWNSIDE BENEFIT?

But many drivers are convinced the stock market downturn has been the key to unbuckling gridlock on area roads.

In fact, when traffic was clogged at its worst back in 1999, Faig said he should have taken that as a sign the market was overheating and it was time to sell a good chunk of his stock portfolio.

“If we were smarter we could have used that as an indicator of the stock market,” Faig said. “When it was the most brutal we should have been selling our stock.”

Commuters say the roads began to clear about the same time dot-com firms hit the skids last year, leaving tens of thousands of workers in small Internet start-ups and other high-tech firms without jobs to drive to.

And once major Silicon Valley stalwarts such as Hewlett Packard, Intel and Cisco joined the race to slice jobs, there has been even more room on Bay Area roads.

“You hear about the Cisco’s and the big ones but when you add up all the smaller ones you have a real downturn,” said KCBS traffic reporter Ron Lyons, who has chronicled the area’s commute for 11 years.

Things are so smooth nowadays that the early morning commuter backup has disappeared on the congested Bay Bridge connecting Oakland to San Francisco, Lyons added.

“The last two or three months have been very light,” Lyons said. “When you have no back-up at the Bay Bridge at 7 a.m. that is a story.”

DRIVING NEVER A BREEZE

No one is suggesting that driving is a breeze in California, which remains overburdened with traffic. The Bay Bridge alone bears more than 280,000 cars each day.

Statewide, statistics show the average California commute is getting longer at 27 minutes in 2000, up from 24.6 minutes in 1990. Rising real estate prices and greater population has also forced more Californians to live farther from their jobs, making commutes longer.

But in the San Francisco area, at least for now, drivers are relishing what appears to be a sudden break in the logjam.

“Since I moved to San Francisco in late January from Santa Clara I have definitely noticed the difference,” said commuter Geoff Borlet. “Back then I would never take highway 101” — one of the area’s busiest stretches. “Now I take it every night.”

Officials caution the traffic turnaround may not last. Colin Jones, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation, agreed traffic has definitely been a lot lighter in the past few months.

He cited the typically slow summer months as a reason, but added that figures definitely showed the Bay Area commute was at its worst during the height of the Internet frenzy as new workers and new cars jammed the roadways. In 2000, for example, traffic congestion soared 38 percent from 1999 — the largest one-year increase ever — as the costs to the region rose to $2.1 million from $1.48 million in lost work hours and other costs, he said.

“That was the peak of the economic expansion and now we are leveling off,” said Jones. “It has kind of been surprising but I don’t want to say permanent.’