I had a similar reaction the first time I heard the word. I was a token undergrad on some college committee in charge of campus beautification or some such thing, and my god, we talked about signs. So taking your question literally, I think the answer is this: For people who think deeply about the semiotics of urban wayfaring (yadda yadda), mere signs do not begin to cover the taxonomy of indicia, physical symbology, soundscaping, and other civil media. Thus “signage” to cover the many sign-cousins that are not signs. The paint here is actually a good example. Would you call it a “sign” in normal usage? It’s the same kind of thing, but we don’t normally think of “signs” as being painted on the ground. So it’s not a sign but it is signage.
So it came about the same way all jargon does, probably.
The time series function is a mess, but for US weather and climate data this is a solid choice. Climate at a Glance | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) It looks like Detroit’s annual precipitation average from 1985-2010 was 851 mm. Personally I wish they would paint curb markings for that type of thing, but in a pretty similar climate in Cleveland you lose a good chunk of the paint each year and it isn’t a common practice in the region. Much more common is to have signs that bracket both ends of a block of spaces.
Surprisingly few Angelinos know this, too. I lived there for 20 years before a Pasadena resident warned me about it when I stayed at her house.
The overnight parking ban is effectively a tax on being poor. If you don’t have own a house with a garage, you don’t deserve to be in Pasadena, basically. They have many other similar things like bans on carports for corner lots, and bans on many types of inexpensive fencing. It’s an unbelievably hostile place to the non-wealthy. All this is enforced through Byzantine and expensive permitting systems. You practically need a permit to mow your lawn in Pasadena.
This is one of the greatest stories in LA history. This guy fixed a signage problem that everyone agreed needed fixing, and did it so professionally that the city didn’t notice for almost a year. They only found out because the artist leaked it to the news.
