Picture yourself driving down a heavily traveled street at the height of rush hour. As you approach a busy intersection, you're dismayed to discover that there isn't any traffic cop on duty, and the automatic signals installed to take his place are working only fitfully.

It isn't a pretty sight.

Neither are the coin designs emerging from the U.S. Mint over the last few years, since Uncle Sam decided that he didn't need a "traffic cop" -- a chief sculptor-engraver --to keep things moving smoothly both technically and aesthetically on the road from coins' conception through design, production and issuance.

That road has gotten crowded during recent years as Congress has saddled the Mint with legislation authorizing dozens of new commemorative coins. The traffic jam will get even bigger, now that the government has given the green light to a 10-year program of circulating quarter dollars honoring the 50 states of the Union.

I strongly support the 50-state coin proposal; I'm convinced that it will generate tremendous new interest in our hobby by making the general public more conscious of the coins we encounter every day and prompting many thousands -- even millions -- of non-collectors to start assembling sets of the statehood Washington quarters.

I'm growing concerned, however, that this blessing may be disguised in artwork that is -- so to speak -- all too pedestrian in nature. And the lack of a chief engraver is one of the greatest warning signs of possible trouble ahead along this road.

More than seven years have passed since the last chief engraver, the gifted Elizabeth Jones, resigned from that position in December 1990 -- or rather, was pushed out the door by Mint Director Donna Pope in a move that I would characterize, somewhat charitably, as misguided.

Since then, the time-honored post -- one that dates back to the origins of the Mint in the early 1790s -- has remained unfilled. In 1993, then-Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen moved to make the vacancy a permanent one by calling for abolition of the job.

Philip N. Diehl, a Bentsen protege and fellow Texan, strongly supported the secretary's stance after assuming his duties as Mint director in February 1994. In an interview soon after that, he told me he considered the chief engraver's post to be an anomaly.

"I think the nature of the job has changed to the point where it's really a management job, and not an artist job," Diehl remarked. "We think that under that new reality, what we really need to run the engraving office is a professional manager, rather than an artist."

The professional manager then running the office, Michael Simon, continues to be in charge of the Mint's engraving staff in Philadelphia. Simon is a highly qualified engineer, a well regarded administrator and a skilled "people person" who has kept artistic temperaments on an admirably even keel. But by his own admission, Simon is not a sculptor or an engraver -- and Diehl's observations notwithstanding, the need for an overseer steeped in medallic art has grown greater, not less urgent, in recent years.

Elizabeth Jones, who knows and admires Simon, put it very well in a recent interview with COINage Magazine Editor Kari Stone:

"Mike Simon is extremely knowledgeable, and he's wonderful to work with, but he's strictly technology -- he's not an artist, and would never pretend to be."

Anyone who doubts a chief engraver's value as a coinage traffic cop should compare the artistic quality of the first modern "commems" -- those that were issued during Jones' Mint tenure -- with those that have come out since she departed. On the whole, those early issues are far superior.

There's a clunker here and there; even Jones could not transform the 1984 Olympic silver dollar, for example, from the sow's ear (and headless torso) that arrived in her studio into a silk purse. But most of the coins are at least competent, and some are outstanding -- in no small measure because Jones herself had a hand in so many of the designs. By contrast, we might have been spared the ghastly Korean War dollar, or the USO dollar with its greeting-card format, if she had been in the catbird seat at the Mint.

A longtime colleague in the numismatic press, Paul M. Green, liked to say that Chief Engraver Jones was a "safety net" for the Mint in matters of art: Her presence assured that there would always be at least one highly competent set of coin designs in any competition (in-house, invited or open) in which she took part. Moreover, she inspired her staff to do its best, guiding the other artists and encouraging them to raise the aesthetic level of their work.

With 50 new designs coming up, I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing that an artist of Elizabeth Jones' stature was regulating the flow of coinage traffic.