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Thanks for nothing

Jiaan has long wondered about the big fat nothing indicated by the sign at the 66 bus stop on Harvard Avenue at Comm. Ave. in Allston: What does it mean?

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Maybe it's an existential bus stop. Maybe it's not really a bus stop. Maybe it is. Maybe it is questioning its existence as a bus stop. Or whether the 66 bus is or not.

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It's a lifestyle.

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Of course, my favorite episode is the Boston one. Complete with North End street scenes and even a few MTA Old Looks making cameos!

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a local artist who was posting what he termed "alternative traffic signs" at various locations throughout Boston and Cambridge. Looks like this sign was part of that project.

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Aren't there laws about traffic signs and what can be put up and what can't?

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Yes. But that hasn't stopped people from trying. My favorite example of sign vigilantisim:

http://magazine.good.is/articles/the-fake-freeway-sign-that-became-a-rea...

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Of course they can. But many states have laws that say that road signage that is confusingly similar to "official" signage can be removed by the city/state under the common-law "public nuisance" concept.

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When I saw that picture, I thought of the guy who did that great project in the early '90s (is that the one you are thinking of?) I still remember one sign near South Station that read, "You believe in the infinite availability of finite resources." There was a Herald article at the time that quoted DPW workers who had to remove the signs; they admired the excellent and believable renditions that he created. This was before there was an app for everything.

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I'm thinking of. And I also remember, and appreciated, the high quality of his work.

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My googling is coming up cold. Any details that you remember, Roadman? Exact year (my guess would be 1991 or 1992)? Something else to pinpoint an article and artist?

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That would be Pat Falco, I believe.

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Looking at Pat Falco's site, the one fake sign work that I saw did not attempt to be confused for something official. His MasArt bio says that he finished in 2010. Sure, maybe he took a gap decade to do something else in the middle before graduating, but the person I'm thinking of was a student in the early 90's.

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I've seen that somewhere else (not Boston, but I can't remember where). I think it's so they don't have to fit "no stopping, no standing, and don't even think of parking here" on a sign that size.

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If you get a hundred dollar ticket for parking in a bus stop can you use for your defense that you believed the signs were an artistic expression?

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without anything else, you might have a shot. However, the official T bus stop sign mounted with that sign negates that defense.

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two signs on it. The top one was a STOP sign. The one immediately below it said "NO STOPPING".

They took it down before I could get a picture, sadly.

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To this day, I'm kicking myself that I didn't get a photo of the village-limits sign before they took it down. They had put a speed-limit sign on the village-limits-sign post, and either maintenance or vandals had edited it a bit. So for some time the remaining panels read, in order:

VILLAGE OF SHOREWOOD HILLS

Population 1565

RADAR ENFORCED

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It's answering the question "What is going to go into the space that used to be Kelly's/Marty's?"

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