To date, the authority has replaced at least 2,185 of the 6,360 signs across the island, renewing about 115 road signs every month since the second quarter of 2024.
In August 2025, The Straits Times visited one of the sign fabrication facilities and observed a team of five workers alternating between slicing aluminium boards, rolling large stickers onto them and carefully peeling and aligning letter stickers.
Essentially, these road signs are mammoth-size stickers, with letters attached to larger green background stickers that are pasted on aluminium plates cut to different sizes.
The sticker production process for a road sign spanning the width of two road lanes lasted more than three hours, with workers kicking off their boots to crouch on the sign – after laying it flat on a table – to carefully align and paste the letters one by one.
The positions of the letters were marked out using a white-coloured pencil and measuring tape, and a metal stencil was used to ensure equal spacing between each letter.
Afterwards, the completed sign underwent reflectivity tests to ensure the letters and symbols were visible when illuminated by vehicle headlights from different angles.
Separately, the supporting metal structure for the road sign – known as the gantry – was built in a work yard three minutes away by car, in Loyang Crescent.
The gantry for this particular sign, whose production ST observed, was around 12m long, 7.2m tall – including the columns – and 0.3m wide. The sign itself measured 9m in length and 2.5m in height.
Fabrication of the horizontal section of the gantry on which the sign rests, also known as the truss, takes about 20 days – excluding the time needed to procure materials.
Every component of the gantry is manually cut to the required measurements before being coated with zinc to prevent corrosion and welded together to form a complete structure for attaching the sign.
Once the components are welded together, magnetic particle inspections are carried out on critical joints – those that bear more weight or connect to larger components – to detect cracks and defects.
This is done by hovering an electromagnetic yoke over the area while spraying magnetic particle suspension powder to check for cracks. White paint is also applied to the surface to allow workers to see the sprayed powder more clearly.
It took a team of about 10 workers nearly 12 hours over two nights in November 2025 to install this particular road sign at Exit 8B of the CTE towards the SLE, leading to Upper Serangoon Road and the PIE towards Changi.
The existing sign and gantry were removed on the first night, while the new sign and its gantry were installed on the second night.
This sign was one of around 60 that required total road closures for the replacement. Such closures are needed for signs that span across entire carriageways or those located near or on slip roads, where the entire slip road must be closed for safety.
It was due for replacement, as LTA noted that it had shown signs of deterioration, such as fading letters.
Workers transported the new gantry to the installation site using trailers, before securing it in place with mobile cranes and rigging equipment to ensure the components were properly aligned.
The sticker signs were then attached directly to the new gantry once it was set up.
It was previously announced that the road sign replacement exercise would start from the fourth quarter of 2023 and be completed by the fourth quarter of 2026.
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LTA told ST that the exercise actually began later, in the first quarter of 2024, which pushed back the completion of the replacement of more than 4,200 road signs to the fourth quarter of 2027.
The start date was adjusted to include additional road signs LTA had identified through its ongoing maintenance programme, the authority added.