The bridge is gone, but the highway signs lead there. Follow them.

Take the beltway south past I-95 and Rt. 40 to the split for Essex. A sign for the Key Bridge leads right.

The traffic lightens. The speed limit’s 55. Cross above the marshy Back River. The inner loop bends around this elbow of land.

Pass under Cove and Beachwood roads. A warehouse has raised a U.S. flag beside the freeway. Slow down because all traffic must exit. In 1,500 feet, the road ends.

There’s no sudden stop before a precipice. The cones squeeze you toward an off-ramp that spits onto North Point Boulevard. You don’t come close enough to see the bridge’s broken east end.

Some three dozen signs for the Francis Scott Key Bridge remain on Maryland highways. These are signs to nowhere, directing drivers to a landmark that no longer stands, and one they cannot reach. What to make of this incongruity?

There were more urgent matters after the Dali slammed into the bridge and knocked it down. There was the rescue effort, the bodies to be recovered. There was the steel to haul out, a shipping channel to reopen. There was the work to pry free a cargo ship that’s longer than two football fields. Done, finished, check.

Four months later, the highway signs stubbornly remain, like ghosts. Our attention turns to them. Should they come down? Should they stay up? Who, even, should decide?

Hundreds of thousands of people drive by these signs each day. For some drivers, the signs are scenery to push from their minds; for others, a reason to turn down the radio and contemplate. Perhaps some drivers just wince.

Terry Turbin, of Dundalk, for one, doesn’t care to drive past the signs and remember, let alone to see a broken bridge. He was a young man when he worked on a barge to drive the pilings for this bridge. That was 1975, and he was a union carpenter. Later, he fished for perch around the piers. He hunted ducks in these waters, too. Turbin passed under the steel span on a cruise ship once. He’s 72 years old, and the Key Bridge formed a backdrop to his life.

“When it came down, it was a big heartbreak,” he said. “I don’t want to see any part of it.”

No, not even those highway signs.

Some bridge signs are the familiar green, some are blue. They have become a symbol — you can even buy the posters online — a symbol of resiliency and our shared grief.

“These signs are somewhere in-between a road sign that gets out information and a memory installation,” said Dawn Jourdan, dean of the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland. “Certainly, you don’t want that memory installation to be distracting on a large, fast-moving roadway.”

Indeed, that’s the difficulty with the matter: I-695 is not a memorial or a museum, but an operating freeway. One can’t stop to reflect in four lanes of traffic. Jourdan, who studies signs, explains, “It is still infrastructure in action.”

Navigation apps also grappled with the sudden collapse of the Key Bridge. In the hours afterward, Google erased it from its maps, while other apps listed it as closed.

The eight-lane I-35W bridge fell into the Mississippi River during rush hour in Minneapolis almost 17 years ago. Cars and trucks plunged into the river, killing 13 people and injuring 145 others. A battered, blue interstate sign for 35W was found among the debris and placed in the Minnesota Historical Society.

In Baltimore, a museum plans to commemorate workers affected by the Key Bridge’s collapse. The Baltimore Museum of Industry is collecting their stories for an oral history project.

“Baltimore is a city that loves its symbols: The signs should not simply be thrown out,” said Curtis Durham, the museum’s collections and exhibitions manager. “There’s too much love, memory, and pain associated with the collapse of the bridge for such an unceremonious end, even for something as relatively commonplace as street signs.”

The museum would consider accepting one of the road signs, Durham wrote in an email. The Banner shared his note with the State Highway Administration.

State officials estimate it will cost nearly $2 billion and take four years to rebuild the bridge, and civil rights groups want to see the bridge renamed.

The highway administration plans to replace or revise all the Key Bridge signs, a spokeswoman said. Workers will install new signs and put green overlays on old ones by the end of August. When finished, “Key Bridge” will be erased.

Six of the signs are too old and deteriorated. They will be removed and scrapped, the highway spokeswoman said. At least, that’s the plan for now.

The bridge is gone, and these signs lead to nowhere. They can’t steer us back to the past.