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Paint it with Pride
June is Pride Month to honor and recognize the history, culture, and resilience of the LGBTQ+ community. As I was walking recently in Washington, DC, I saw the 15th Street Cycletrack – one of the most popular bicycle facilities in the city and my former route to and from work – had received an impressively colorful and creative paint job for Pride.
For years, communities and artists have looked to streets as places to express themselves and create art. Sometimes, these efforts have faced opposition and in some cases artistic street treatments have been removed. For communities and artists interested in adding art to their streets, knowing the rules for where art can go and how it might be restricted by law is an important part of ensuring that projects have staying power.
At the federal level, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) provides the standards, guidance, and recommendations for how streets in the United States are striped, painted, and marked. Non-compliance with the MUTCD has been used by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to justify the removal or non-approval of rainbow crosswalks in communities like Buffalo and St. Louis. In Ames, Iowa the city attorney said, “the FHWA has no jurisdiction over the street where the crosswalk is and it doesn’t receive federal funding and is not part of a federal highway, then it’s up to the state of Iowa to determine if the crosswalk follows federal control standards.”
Here are some tips for ensuring that your asphalt art is MUTCD-compliant:
- Use the MUTCD as a reference
- The most relevant sections will be in Part 3 – Markings, particularly 3H.03 – Aesthetic Surface Treatments.
- Understand that the MUTCD has a limited scope —traffic control devices—and that you can create art that is separate from and does not interact with traffic control purposes.
- “Aesthetic surface treatments and intersection murals are not considered traffic control devices and, therefore, are not governed by the MUTCD,” as long as they do not interact with and adversely impact official traffic control devices.
- Understand that the MUTCD provides for how to designate parts of the paved roadway area as not part of the roadway, allowing art in those designated areas.
- For example, Section 3J.07 says, “Sidewalk extensions reclaim a portion of the roadway, sometimes including a portion of parking lanes, shoulders, and/or the traveled way, and repurpose that area for non-vehicular uses…The paved area between the double solid line forming the sidewalk extension designated by pavement markings and the sidewalk or other roadside area is not part of the roadway.”
- The MUTCD provides limited restrictions on art so that it does not interact with traffic control purposes or create confusion.
- Examples include:
- Art not being retroreflective,
- Art not creating “3-D” designs,
- Art not including advertisements, and
- Art not including MUTCD-defined symbols, pictographs, or paint colors.
- Examples include:
- The MUTCD has non-binding guidance for muted colors, but the only true color restrictions are against the use of paint colors specified in the MUTCD for specific traffic control devices.
Looking at the Pride paint on the 15th Street Cycletrack, you can see that the traffic engineers and artists in Washington, DC were conscious of the restrictions of the MUTCD and implemented their art accordingly. Most prominently, the designers used solid white lines to mark spaces as outside of the traveled roadway and placed art in those non-roadway locations rather than spanning areas of the roadway as in a crosswalk.
Under the first Trump administration, the MUTCD was used as a reason for the administration to remove and erase Pride-themed street art. In the second Trump administration, we have seen an increased interest in using federal funding — rather than the MUTCD — to challenge local policies related to immigration enforcement and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies. By complying with the MUTCD, you can make potential roadway-focused anti-LGBT actions of this administration more difficult.