It’s not a bad idea, of course, to air on the side of caution when it comes to street lighting systems such as commercial luminaires and decorative lamp posts and signage systems such as traffic signs and custom aluminum street signs. And here at Brandon Industries, we take pride in providing communities with reliable, top-quality streetscape products at affordable prices.

But careful, accurate streetscape installations can save your community a bit of money that can be used elsewhere (say, on attractive courtyard lighting for a park or community space) — without sacrificing safety.

Our streetscape experts can help.

For example, how can your community decide exactly how many street lights (and what type of street lamps) are needed to keep your streets safe for pedestrians and drivers alike — without going overboard and ordering and installing extra lights that don’t actually enhance lighting coverage or aesthetic appeal. Each community has unique needs concerning streetlights, depending upon the landscape of the neighborhood and specific traffic patterns. So each community will require a unique streetscape solution.

Or, for another example, your community’s wayfinding sign needs and traffic sign needs will depend specifically on both local and state laws and regulations.

Here at Brandon Industries, we’ve been serving the streetscape needs of neighborhoods nationwide for nearly 25 years. So we have a highly refined, unmatched understanding of what is needed in most streetscape installations. But beyond our own experience and expertise, we also know when to ask for help — and when outside experts are needed (such as a local lighting engineer, city government officials or neighborhood association representatives). We can tell you who you need to check with concerning different installations, as well as how to find them.

But the first step is simply to contact us with any questions about what’s right for your neighborhood, business center, retail center, school, park or entertainment complex.

Our sign posts are tough, reliable, and durable — but only, of course, if they’re installed correctly. Thankfully, with a little bit of know-how, erecting one of our street sign poles is pretty simple.

Two important notes to remember before you start:

1. Contact Local Authorities!

Before you even place your order, go ahead and contact your local authorities first to make sure the post will comply with all local ordinances, codes, and regulations. Codes change from community to community, and factors you might not have thought about could be a problem, including requirements about clearance heights, sign dimensions, and vinyl types. Here at Brandon Industries, we have a flexible, friendly customer service policy, but it’ll save you both time and money to make sure the sign post you’re installing is legal before you start digging.

2. Don’t Get Hurt!

Buried gas lines and power lines abound along streets and sidewalks, especially in newer neighborhood developments. So before you break ground, be sure to contact the local utility companies first. They’ll tell you where to dig, and what to avoid. Dig carefully.

Now let’s begin:

1. Dig a hole. How wide and deep the hole needs to be depends local codes and soil conditions.

2. Insert the pole.  It’s important to make sure that the pole’s channels or holes are properly aligned with the street (in other words, make sure the the street sign will be facing the correct direction, perfectly perpendicular to the street).

3. Level the pole carefully, and brace it into place.

4. Create a form for the cement footing. You want to make sure the footing will be slightly above the grade of the ground, in order to protect the pole’s finish from soil and lawn equipment.

5. Carefully fill the hole with cement or concrete.

6. Recheck with a level before the cement fully dries. Adjust if needed.

7. Give the concrete some time to cure before installing signs or other components. You might need to drill some holes to install the signs, which could throw the pole out of balance again or crack the concrete.

These instructions are valid for the vast majority of the sign poles we offer, including four-inch channel poles,  four-inch fluted round poles, three-inch fluted round poles, and four-inch smooth square poles. But if you have questions, go ahead and give one of our sign pole specialists a call for more information.

Wired Magazine tells the story of a community in California that was having a difficult time getting drivers to slow down in school zones. Even increased police enforcement had only a limited effect. But after installing a series of radar feedback signs, drivers slowed down by an average of 14 percent.

According to Wired:

“The signs were curious in a few ways. For one thing, they didn’t tell drivers anything they didn’t already know—there is, after all, a speedometer in every car. If a motorist wanted to know their speed, a glance at the dashboard would do it. For another thing, the signs used radar, which decades earlier had appeared on American roads as a talisman technology, reserved for police officers only. Now Garden Grove had scattered radar sensors along the side of the road like traffic cones. And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up—no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them.”

The key was what scientists call a “feedback loop.”

Basically, if you equip people with information about their actions in real-time, they’ll improve their behavior. Tell drivers that they’re speeding, and they’ll usually slow down. For another example — tell drivers that they’re using too much gasoline (via, say, the consumption display in a Toyota Prius), and they’ll actively try to improve their efficiency.

And they work. Again, according to Wired:

“So feedback loops work. Why? Why does putting our own data in front of us somehow compel us to act? In part, it’s that feedback taps into something core to the human experience, even to our biological origins. Like any organism, humans are self-regulating creatures, with a multitude of systems working to achieve homeostasis. Evolution itself, after all, is a feedback loop, albeit one so elongated as to be imperceptible by an individual. Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it’s something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford’s Bandura put it, “People are proactive, aspiring organisms.” Feedback taps into those aspirations.”

Here at Brandon Industries, we offer a full line of driver feedback signs that can effectively slow down drivers and make your community’s streets a safer place for families. But the feedback loop principle applies partially to more than just radar feedback signs — even without real-time feedback, any of the street signage systems your community, school, or business park uses to transmit important information can be more effective through careful, repetitious installation.

For example, colorful custom logo signs and custom aluminum signs that display your community’s logo transmit “real-time” information about where the driver is — and remind them that these streets are where kids and families could be playing.

The feedback loop principle just proves how important strategic streetscape planning is for safety in your neighborhood. We’re eager to help neighborhoods build effective, safety-boosting streetscapes.

What are they?

Basically, breakaway poles are specifically engineered to break when struck by a vehicle. This design is helpful in high-speed environments, where an unyielding sign post could make a off-road traffic accident significantly worse. The cost of a sign, of course, will never outweigh the cost of a human life.

In fact, instead of being a potentially deadly roadside hazard, breakaway poles can actually act as a sort of crash cushion. In the event of a crash, the breakaway poles absorbing most of the impact energy (instead of returning it to the vehicle), while still slowing down the runaway vehicle. It’s an excellent way to boost safety in your city, neighborhood, or commercial development.

Where on the road can you find breakaway design?

In general, you can find breakaway technology in a diverse range of roadside devices, including traffic signs, mailboxes, traffic signals, light posts, call boxes, utility poles, and more.

Here at Brandon Industries, we offer a large inventory of Federal Highway Administration-approved breakaway engineering with our sign poles, including our 3″ OD fluted sign pole, and 4″ OD fluted sign pole. These sign poles are ideal for stop signs, speed limit signs, and other custom road signs.

Does this undermine durability and strength?

Nope. They’re strong, durable, long-lasting, and constructed from premium materials, just like all of our sign poles.

Are breakaway poles ever legally required?

Breakaway requirements vary from city to city and state to state, depending on the type of road or highway—both the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and Texas Department of Transportation (TXDoT) have slightly different recommendations and requirements—so it can get to be a little bit confusing. If you have questions about where breakaway poles are required in your community, contact one of our Dallas signage professionals for help. We’ll get you what your community needs.

New sign pole option. New sharp look for your neighborhood’s streetscapes. Same Brandon Industries standard of toughness, long-lasting construction, and style.

Our new 4-inch smooth square sign poles give streetscape customers yet another series of stately, attractive options for their neighborhood, business park, and shopping center signage needs.

Let’s take a look:

The poles can be accented with a diverse range of bases and finials. And, of course, the poles can be outfitted with just about every street sign imaginable, including stop signs, speed limit signs and reserved parking signs.  The new poles only enhance our already unmatched line of signage systems, which includes custom logo signs, wayfinding signs, and custom aluminum signs.

For example, check out our 4-inch square 1 model stop sign posts, featuring stylish bases, finials, and sign brackets durably constructed from cast aluminum. Or, check out our 4-inch square 6 model speed limit signs, which also boasts a combination of rugged construction and smart stylizing.

Here’s the bottom line: The right streetscape products can add elements of class and style to your community’s streets, without sacrificing industrial-strength reliability and craftsmanship. Our new square poles can both boost neighborhood home values and save long-term costs through superior construction and design.

Contact our street sign experts for more information, or check out our complete line of signposts and poles, including 3-inch fluted round poles and 4-inch fluted round poles.

When it comes to planned communities, the difference between those that bloom and those that just sort of blend into obscurity is in the details: Inviting parks. Safe streets. Excellent schools. A cohesive, community oriented vibe and spirit.

Here at Brandon Industries, we take the same approach, and believe our carefully constructed, intricately designed streetscape products can provide communities with the high-quality “details” needed to thrive.

Take a look at our line of outdoor street lamps. They’re tough, durable, and constructed from high-quality materials like cast-aluminum parts with a polyester powder coat finish, and — like community lighthouses — will keep your community safe and illuminated in even the most blinding storms. But they’re also stately, elegant, and attractive, and full of little details that demonstrate a commitment to excellence. For example, several models of our line of commercial luminaires feature sophisticated gold oval bands. Our line of stately courtyard lamps feature intricate details like bevel glass lenses. And our comprehensive catalog of commercial streetlamp posts include more than six models of posts, each carefully crafted to anchor your community’s outdoor lighting system with class.

Similarly, we’re proud to offer a diverse range of decorative mailboxes that are built from cast-aluminum, blend traditional casting methods with today’s technology, and are eager to be the first thing many folks notice about your home. But they’re also stylish and evoke nostalgic feelings of yesteryear. In fact, cohesively themed mailboxes are a great way for your neighborhood to demonstrate community solidarity.

Our custom signage systems are also exactly the sort of details that stand out to visitors and residents alike. Acting almost as “the handshake” of your neighborhood, these long-lasting signs both provide the details — driving directions, community information, etc. — that make visitors feel at home, and look impressive and classy while doing so.

For first-time visitors, an ornamental wayfinding sign is the handshake from your neighborhood. Attractive, stately, and durable, they welcome visitors with a spirit of helpfulness and warmth. They boast about the great things your community has to offer (Pool! Clubhouse! School! Golf! Parks!). They demonstrate a commitment to detail, cohesiveness, and class. And they help drivers get where they’re going more efficiently (which means safer, less congested streets for your kids).

Perhaps most importantly—now that the summer home-buying season is heating up and plenty of prospective home-buyers are dropping by—they help your neighborhood stand out from surrounding communities. A full palette of possible shapes and sizes are available. And we’ll work with you to find the right custom logo that fits the signs and successfully ties the neighborhood together with a common brand.

But beyond your neighborhood’s streets, our custom logo wayfinding signs can be useful for a host of other purposes, including:

• Navigating golf courses
• Keeping kids from getting lost on neighborhood trails and sidewalks
• Organizing parking at business centers and entertainment centers
• Cheerfully displaying rules, regulations, and community information
• Highlighting community perks (pools, community centers, tennis courts)
• Adding a sense of cohesiveness across the community

Similarly, in addition to wayfinding signs, the rest of our line of custom logo signs also come in a variety of shapes, colors, and sizes — each constructed from the highest quality of materials. These signs include:

• HDPE (high-density polyethylene) signs
• 18×24 ACP (aluminum composite panel) signs
• 22×30 ACP signs
• Custom aluminum street signs

In other words, we offer just about every type of streetscape sign your neighborhood could possibly need.

Long days, warm nights, and big parties — summer is coming. At Brandon Industries, we can help your neighborhood prepare. Here are just a few possible streetscape solutions you might want to start thinking about before the summer months arrive:

Schools Out: Time to Play

Kids will soon be out of school, and the last thing you’ll want is for them to spend the summer cooped up around a video game system. But for the kids to have a summer full of healthy, memorable days climbing trees, playing sports, and running around outside, safety must take top priority.

The most obvious safety threat is traffic, because drivers won’t always be driving as carefully and cautiously as they could be. In other words, you want people to drive through your neighborhood expecting kids to be chasing a soccer ball out into the street from time to time.

We can help you build a signage system that encourages safe driving, both through a full catalog of regulatory and traffic signs, custom signs (“Caution: Kids Playing”), and extra efforts like radar driver feedback signs.

Warm Nights, Fun Under the Lights

Days are (finally) stretching long past dinner time, and nighttime temps are approaching the summery balm we all know and love. Especially once daytime temps approach unbearable, folks are going to start spending more and more time outdoors at night.

Effective outdoor lighting— along walkways and around public areas, as well as streets—is critical to keeping things safe and fostering a sense of community by encouraging people to gather and play. And you don’t need to sacrifice aesthetic quality to do all this—our attractive luminaires and courtyard lamps are stately, elegant, tasteful, and cohesive.

Time to Party

Summer is the season of carnivals, festivals, farmers markets, golf outings, outdoor concerts, garage sales, and all around outdoor merriment. In other words, it’s the time when many communities hold big parties and events partially designed to invite in friends and neighbors from other parts of the city.

This means regular bursts of first-time visitors will be coming to your neighborhood, which means two things:

• An effective network of custom wayfinding signs is key to getting folks where they’re going quickly and easily, minimizing traffic and keeping the streets safe for your kids.
• Attractive, comprehensive streetscape solutions and touches like decorative mailboxes and custom logo signs that impress visitors, highlight your community’s commitment to detail and excellence, and solidify your neighborhood’s reputation as a desirable one (which will eventually be reflected in higher home values).

Your community is unique, its people are unique, and its needs are unique. So when it comes to signage systems, flexibility and customization are key. At Brandon Industries, our signage systems provide an unmatched level of flexibility and customization, and we make it easy forge signage solutions tailored to the unique and demanding needs of your community.

Here are three ways to mix, match, and customize:

1. Logos

Our custom logo signs help create aesthetic cohesion and geographical awareness in communities—in heavily residential areas, the logo can provide a welcoming indicator for visitors about just where, in fact, they are. But above all, they can help your neighborhood unite behind a single symbol of identity. A neighborhood is more than just a collection of homes—it’s a community of relationships, memories, and values. A custom logo can represent all of that.

The effect is the same in business parks, shopping centers, and historical or entertainment districts—a logo helps define a sense of place and purpose, wherever it’s used.

2. Size, Color, and Shape

Our custom aluminum signs, HDPE and ACE signs, and wayfinding signs come in a full, sumptuous smorgasbord of shapes and sizes—from red antique street signs to black, stately landmark signs to green, elegant wayfinding signs. Creative use of color and shape with your signs simply helps them stand out and do their jobs—to communicate, to inform, to guide drivers and pedestrians to where they’re going, and maintaining a safe, orderly, attractive community of homes, businesses, or shops.

3. Details, Details, Details

From sign trims to fluted poles to stately, decorative finials and bases, we offer a full catalog of those extra little sign details and accessories that make your signage systems stand out, and show your community as one that will go the extra mile for professionalism, excellence, and class.

The choices are yours. Contact our signage system experts for more information.

• Traffic Decongestant

If drivers can get where they’re going more quickly, and not spend even that extra few minutes circling around like vultures looking for an optimal parking spot, traffic congestion will clear up considerably. And fewer cars crawling around means less risk of a safety incident—whether in a shopping center, a downtown culture and entertainment district, a business park, or a neighborhood full of kids

Furthermore, if a customer’s first memory about a particular shopping center is how hurried and harried they were after having to fight through the crowds of cars, they’ll be much less likely to return in the future. A more pleasant and satisfactory overall experience will plant a positive memory in shoppers’ minds, making them more eager to come back and browse.

• Business Booster

Shoppers usually come to a center with one specific store in mind. But one great advantage of clumping a bunch of stores together is the ability to tap into that “impulse buy” (or at least “impulse browse”) factor. Even if customers look to wayfinding signs primarily to, well, find their way to where they originally planned to go, attractive wayfinding signs can be used as subtle advertisements for the other stores in a complex.

• Community Creator

What do a book store, a hair salon, and a Thai restaurant really have in common? A system of attractive, coherent wayfinding signs takes a disparate collection of locations and unites them beneath a cohesive sense of place.
A group of pet stores, sandwich stops, and bridal boutiques suddenly becomes a shopping center. Two museums, and urban park, and a row of cafes, art galleries and nightclubs become an “entertainment district.” A street full of random buildings that have been around since the first Roosevelt administration becomes a “historic byway.” These sorts of communities tend to invite shoppers and visitors to come and explore (rather than just head to one specific location), benefiting everyone there.

At Brandon Industries, we offer a full catalog of stately, effective wayfinding signs. Contact one our Dallas streetscape experts for more information.