The Boulder Police Department is investigating 14 illegally placed signs with explicit traffic safety messages like “DON’T KILL ANY KIDS TODAY” and “SLOW THE F— DOWN.”
“We don't right now have any information about who put them up,” department spokesperson Dionne Waugh said Thursday. “We do know that they're very professionally designed signs. They're very large. They're very well done. So someone went to a lot of trouble to put these large signs up.”
The signs were first reported on Monday, Waugh said. Photos of the signs quickly circulated online, generating buzz and commentary on social media sites like X and Reddit.
Several were concentrated along 28th Street, a busy north-south thoroughfare that the city has identified as being particularly dangerous. It saw hundreds of crashes between 2016 and 2020, according to the city’s “Vision Zero” traffic safety plan.
By Tuesday, the signs were taken down.
Waugh said she understood the sentiment behind the signs but did not agree with the method.
“We want people to be safe, whether they're in a car, walking, biking, or running in the city,” she said. “But putting up illegal signs on official signs is not the way to do that.”
Brockton Kick, a barista at Le French Café near where one of the signs appeared, said that traffic safety — especially speeding — is a major problem in Boulder but also questioned the rogue signer’s tactics.
“The format that they use that in is not the greatest,” Kick said. “It is in fact more distracting than it is actually getting the message across.”
Other reactions were more supportive: We need more of these plus speed cameras in Boulder!” one Boulderite wrote on social media.
Custom traffic signs are readily available online. The Boulder signs are far from the first high-quality fakes to hit Colorado roads.
In August, a conservative artist claimed responsibility for a series of racist signs attached to bus stop signs in Denver. Last month, the city said it would remove an unauthorized “customer parking only” sign in front of a business in northwest Denver.
State transportation officials are also struggling with fake license plates. The company that operates automated enforcement cameras on a growing number of Colorado’s toll lanes has recorded dozens of false license plates with words like “T1RESLYR” on them.
Are you the mysterious Boulder sign-poster? Reporter Nathaniel Minor wants to hear from you. Reach him at [email protected].
