It isn’t the most glamorous field of research, but James McDonald would say his work at Texas Tech will help save lives.

Professor McDonald is a member of a small army of researchers who have been studying the durability of the metal structures that support highway signs. In recent years, they have come upon some troubling findings: Many of those overhead metal signs, relied on by motorists looking for their exit, are in danger of falling.

Mr. McDonald found that gusts of wind produced by passing trucks and powerful storm systems can lead to sign collapses. His research was among the reasons officials of New York State required safer structures for highway signs.

Even Mr. McDonald, however, is surprised at the cost.

According to change-order documents for the state’s huge rehabilitation project on an eastern portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the replacement of just 12 highway signs cost the state nearly $2 million more than was budgeted when the contract for the project, the largest ever undertaken by the state Department of Transportation, was signed. The rehabilitation work, soon to be completed, is expected to cost about $252 million, 17% over budget. The cost per sign has risen almost 700%.

When he was told of the cost hikes for the sign supports, Mr. McDonald said: “I find that hard to believe. That just sounds totally out of the ballpark to me.”

State officials said there is no confusion. Indeed, taxpayers had better get used to the prices. The BQE sign structures were the first of up to 4,500 signs to be replaced under tough new safety standards for the scaffolding that holds up overhead highway signs. If the price tag contained in BQE project budget documents is any indication, over time the cost to comply with the new regulation could rise as high as $475 million.

A spokesman for the State Department of Transportation, Peter Graves, said the new regulation, which applies to the poles and bolts that hold signs in place over freeways, is a necessary safety precaution. A federal trade group, the Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, recommended stronger highway sign-support systems in the 1990s, after reports that some had given out and caused accidents on stretches of highway around the nation.

New York state officials decided to adopt the stronger supports for all sign structures on highways built after 2000 after discovering cracks and fissures in some highway signs during its annual inspection process. Mr. Graves said that the DOT is not aware of anyone’s being injured or killed by falling highway signage in New York State, but that the potential litigation and public fallout were too great to ignore the trade group’s recommendations.

The new regulations from the DOT call for the phase-out of 5-inch aluminum tubes and their replacement with 10-inch steel pipes – which are, one contractor said, “enormous.”

“We decided to go with this standard ourselves because there’s an understanding that had we not, and having found cracks and fissures, there’s the possibility you could have a strong gust of wind or a spell of cold weather, it could fall on traffic,” Mr. Graves said.

Not all of the signs are being replaced immediately. The state has an inspection program, and officials plan to replace the aluminum sign structures gradually, as they show indications of wear.

The 12 overhead sign structures for the current BQE project cost $1.2 million, or about $100,000 a pop. That compares to an original budgeted total of $155,945, or $12,995 per sign, for aluminum sign supports.

That doesn’t include an additional $300,000 for profit, labor, and materials that the project’s main contractor, Slattery Skanska, and subcontractors billed the state to install the heavier sign structures.

That $25,000 per sign breaks down as follows.

Because the sign structures are heavier, they are more expensive to transport. For each sign it put up, Skanska charged the state about $4,000 for labor and $1,028 for equipment.

Skanska, citing “labor union regulations and handling requirements,” instructed the signs’ manufacturer, Stony Brook Manufacturing, not to deliver the sign structures directly to the site. Instead, Stony Brook delivered the posts to the yard of a subcontractor, United Fence, at the Suffolk County community of Ronkonkoma. United Fence then transported the extremely heavy materials – the steel weighs five to six times as much as the aluminum – in three trailers to the BQE construction site in Woodside, Queens.

The labor costs were as follows: A delivery crew included three teamsters – at $63.29 an hour, or $1,027 a sign – to bring the sign structures in three different loads. An oiler cost $1,027 a sign, to handle the larger and more expensive hydraulic crane, and two ironworkers were paid a total of $1,946 a night to do the bolting.

On the BQE project, United Fence took a 20% subcontractor markup/profit of $16,000, and the general contractor, Skanska, added a $4,000 markup.

All told, the decision to make the 12 BQE sign structures out of steel instead of aluminum cost the state $1.8 million.

State officials take consolation in the durability of the steel structures. Their life span is supposed to be 50 to 60 years, compared to only 30 years for the aluminum structures.