This reminds me of a recent problem at work. Basically, it was a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a bad design decis

This reminds me of a recent problem at work. Basically, it was a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a fix to a problem caused by a bad design decision. The obvious fix would have altered the behavior of the first fix, which we weren't sure we could do, because someone may have come to rely on the behavior of the first fix. But overall, we were just very frustrated that we couldn't just address the initial bad design decision, and make the whole mess evaporate into the aether, because none of those problems exist with the standard (and good enough) design. The disability parking placard is a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a fix to a problem caused by a bad design decision. We can't exactly go all the way back to the root problem without a time machine, but we don't have to be stuck messing around at the leaf-level of the problem tree. The best solution to the blue parking spaces problem is probably not to mess around with plates and placards. It may actually be to reduce the need for anyone--and the people with mobility impairments in particular--to continually walk across parking lots in order to live their lives. There shouldn't really be that much of a distinction between medically unable to walk, too lazy to walk, and too busy/important to walk. If everyone only had to walk as much as they wanted to, no one would have to pretend they couldn't. The real problem is that everything in the US is already so far apart you can't economically walk any of it, and therefore you have to drive. So you have to make everything even further apart, to accommodate cars. But now you have to walk and drive and park and walk. Then you have to regulate parking for people who can't walk as much. And then people cheat, because they already have to park so far away from the place they actually want to be. You're just piling patches on top of fixes. So you design to eliminate the walking in the first place, and have your parks and rec departments install unnecessary superfluous walking trails for the people who still want to walk without a treadmill. (This is essentially the same problem in Dwarf Fortress for how to get and maintain a large population without killing your framerate. You essentially have to eliminate pathfinding from your fortress, so that your dwarves never have to walk more than a few steps to do anything. It is tremendously difficult to do that without some very detailed planning.)