The Road to Apostrophell is paved with errors

On the way home to Newcastle from Leeds yesterday, I spotted a digital road sign on the A184, just before the Redheugh bridge:

This sign is irritating for two reasons:

1. Why is there a comma in the place of the apostrophe?
2. Why is Newcastle abbreviated by only dropping two letters? The apostrophe (or its bogus counterpart) takes up one of those letters, leaving a total saving on one character - what's the point?

The sign is a dot-matrix and so can be configured to show an apostrophe, so why it was displaying the above, I don't know.

The Punchline

There was a spare dot matrix cell on the left of the sign, there was no reason why it could not have said "Newcastle" in full!

1 April 2001
Ashley Frieze