Luckily I don't drive, so this has never been an issue for me. But proper names are different in any case, and I'll bet it was spelled that way to save space on the sign.

nonelvis will probably remember this: On one of the other boards we belong to, there was a woman (Lola? Lolita?) who used to write "site" and "lite" and "thru" and shit like that, and it drove everyone on the board crazy. No matter how many times she was corrected and asked not to do it, she would keep it up. She claimed they were accepted spellings because she had seen them in print. Eventually the boardrunner wrote a script so that every time she used one of those words, they would be replaced with "It's spelled L-I-G-H-T, Lola. LIGHT not LITE!" (depending on the word she used, of course).

I think she got banned eventually.