‘It feels wrong’: Calgary traffic sign spelling mistakes garner attention

Look hard enough and you’ll find mistakes with some Calgary traffic signs — but what happens when someone gets it wrong?

Road signs help guide drivers to get to where they want to go and lately some Calgarian motorists have noticed a few that are slightly off.

One such sign in the city’s southeast spells Macleod Trail with capital ‘L’ instead of small ‘l’.

Calgary resident Farkhod Fayzull was startled when he came across another nearby sign on Stoney Trail where Chaparral was misspelled with an ‘e’.

“I was driving through Stoney Trail and then reading the sign, because the new segment and new bridge, I was expecting they would install a new sign,” said Fayzull. “I look at it and there’s a typo.”

“I was like, what? How did this even happen?”

Responsibility for the error is dependent on the roadway in question.

Fred Lee is an Operations Manager with Alberta Transportation and says mispelled signs along routes like Stoney are the province’s responsibility. Signs with error on inner-city routes would fall to the City of Calgary.

“The Calgary district office will review all complaints of spelling errors and any other issues along the provincial highways in the Calgary area, and mitigate the issues if required accordingly,” said Lee.

The Chaparral spelling error has since been fixed by the province, but Fayzull believes Calgarians should care about something as minor as a spelling issue.

“I mean having a typo, you drive through the street and thousands of people see that, it’s like, it feels wrong,” he says.