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Taggers Find Freeway Signs Are Playing Hard to Get

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Consider it a sign of the times.

Los Angeles’ infamous taggers and graffiti artists are being baffled. Caltrans would like to keep it that way.

Since 1990, Caltrans has installed razor wire on some 1,200 signs over freeways coursing through Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The razor wire, a nasty cousin to barbed wire, was viewed as a last resort by Caltrans officials trying to deter vandals from tagging--or worse, re-tagging--the big green signs.

“Overhead signs are phenomenally expensive to clean,” explained Caltrans spokesman Russ Snyder. “Unfortunately, because of their prominence, they are also like the Holy Grail to taggers.”

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So, once Caltrans workers climbed up to clean an overhead sign, they would frame it in the menacing razor wire--a process that took two days because the stuff is so difficult to handle. Even careful workers occasionally cut themselves.

Installing the wire on each sign costs up to $1,000 and two days of intermittent lane closures on already-clogged freeways. But with a 95% effectiveness in preventing repeat graffiti, it was almost worth it.

Almost.

Commuters complained. People didn’t like the aesthetics of it--the idea of their freeway looking like the inside of Folsom. Both Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol conceded that the solution was evocative of a police state. One teen-age ex-tagger, asked his opinion, said he liked it, pronouncing it “kinda punk.”

Still, says Snyder, “The razor wire was only a last resort. We (at Caltrans) never liked it from the first place.”

In the 1994-95 fiscal year, Californians will spend $7.5 million to remove freeway graffiti statewide. And, as Caltrans notes, each dollar spent on paint and water-blasting and ladders and workers and--horrors--lane closures is one less dollar that can be spent to mend cracked and potholed and buckling freeways.

So now Caltrans is fielding a more livable--and permanent--graffiti deterrent--the Vandal Baffle.

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Also known as “hoods,” the baffles consist of four large panels surrounding the sign on all sides. The 18-inch deep, angled green metal frame is reminiscent of the “squirrel baffles” installed on birdhouse perches to prevent the little rodents from gobbling up the birdseed. The idea is similar as well.

The green baffling, aside from blending inconspicuously into the signs and making for happier motorists, is designed to make it difficult--or better yet, impossible--for would-be vandals to reach around and leave their monikers. Caltrans--which began putting up the baffles late last year--has no word yet on how effective the 100 or so installed around Los Angeles are.

Neither has Caltrans analyzed the cost of installing these hooded protectors.

Although workers on crews installing the wire have been treated for minor slashes and gouges, there have been no reports of taggers being injured by the wire. What’s not yet clear is if only the threat of the razor’s edge is scary enough to fend off vandals willing to risk death by dangling over a freeway with a spray-paint can, as those who attack the overhead signs must do.

“I am not sure that anything will ever be as effective as razor wire,” Snyder said. “But if we can find something nearly as effective--and less ugly--then we are very interested.”

The easier-on-the-eye hoods are also easier to install. According to Caltrans, after a sign is cleaned, the baffling can be installed in a matter of hours, compared to the two days the large, protectively wrapped crews needed to oh-so-cautiously attach the razor wire.

Sometimes the CHP crosses paths with taggers by catching the live ones and arresting them, which can bring a $1,200 fine against them or their parents. But the highway patrol also has to deal with the others, the ones that fell to their deaths in the traffic, or were hit by vehicles as they crossed the freeway at night, said CHP spokesman Steve Kohler.

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Kohler says he’s perplexed by the whole ugly phenomenon, especially when he tries to decipher the strange scrawls:

“I just can’t understand it. These kids are risking life and limb to get their name or message or whatever in the best place, the highest place,” Kohler said. “And then I can’t even read whatever it is that was so important for them to say.”

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