Reassurance Marker - North America

North America

In the United States and Canada, reassurance markers (also called reassurance shields or confirming shields) usually take the form of a shield displaying the road number on an elevated pole, with a plate above or below it indicating the "official" direction of that side of the route. (The official long-range direction may differ from the short-range direction; for example, a large stretch of I-90 near Buffalo, New York runs north-south, although the route is officially east-west.) The direction portion of the sign confirms that the driver is going the right way along the desired road. On larger roads, reassurance markers are sometimes posted on a sign that is elevated on a gantry.

In the United States, reassurance shields are defined in Section 2D.31 of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD). The MUTCD recommends that reassurance assemblies be placed:

• 25–200 feet (8–61 m) after intersections of numbered highways
• Between intersections in urban areas as needed
• After leaving the limits of any incorporated city or town
• Periodically in other places for reassurance purposes

The MUTCD requires a cardinal directional sign to be posted with the route shield to further reassure travelers that they are traveling the correct direction on their route. However, this standard is not always followed, especially in urban areas. One example of this is found in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, where directional signs for Interstate 64 are not posted between the road's eastern terminus in Chesapeake and Interstate 264 in Norfolk, because the road travels in the opposite compass direction from its official designation (although the route in the Norfolk-to-Chesapeake direction is a continuation of I-64 east, it travels westward at that point).