TOO MUCH INFORMATION.(The Talk of the Town)

New Yorkers returning home after the Republican Convention last summer were startled and alarmed by an inexplicable new sight: oversized street signs hanging above busy intersections all over town. It has been five months now, and regrettably, unlike the Republicans, the new signs apparently are not going to go back where they came from.

The signs, if you have somehow missed them, are long and green with big white letters, like a "thru traffic" sign on the New Jersey Turnpike, and they loom ominously out over the intersections they superintend, suspended from the arms of traffic-light poles. They name the street that runs beneath them (and therefore, of course, announce to drivers the street they may want to turn onto), and they do this loudly and with unfortunate abbreviations. Over the intersection of Park Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, for instance, there is now a long green sign proclaiming "Park Av," with no period. A couple of blocks east, it gets worse: the green sign rubbernecks its way out into the middle of the street and announces "3Av." This keeps up (2Av, 1Av) until 86St runs, at last, into East End Av.

The Department of Transportation will tell you that it started hanging the new signs a year ago, and that so far there are about a thousand of them (it has another fifteen hundred to go), and that they are going up at what the D.O.T. calls "major signalized intersections" around town. There are already three hundred and four of them in Manhattan, on the "crosstown corridors."

The new signs put you immediately in mind of those nightmarish car trips in Los Angeles, where you begin somewhere and, forty-five minutes later, you are somewhere else, and all the while you have been looking for a big sign that reads "Pico." Worse than merely unfamiliar, though, the signs are infuriating--first, because they are there for the convenience of cars, and thus violate the first Law of Civilization, which states that nothing must ever be done for the convenience of cars (the mark of ...