10 ms·

Although I completely agree the designed signs are much, much better than the existing ones, there is another problem. Why should you have so many rules for par

• jmilloy 12y ago
  > Why should you have so many rules for parking? There are three options: - You can park here for free - You must pay to park here - You cannot park here You're examples only relate to the first two, where you can always park, but sometimes you have to pay and sometimes you don't. It's easy in those cases to only specify when you have to pay, even when the schedule is different on Sunday (like your third example). When you have to add in additional information about when you cannot park (for cleaning, snow removal, altered traffic patterns during heavy commute times, etc), now you need two signs. Well, or two notices on the same sign. You can park for free if it's not a time on either notice. This is in the example at the top of the article.
  • wlesieutre 12y ago
    - You can park here for free for one hour - You can park here for free for two hours - You can park here for free for as long as you want - You must pay to park here and can park for up an hour - You must pay to park here and can park for up to two hours - You must pay to park here and can park as long as you want to pay for - You cannot park here
    • jmilloy 12y ago
      Agreed. Of course, we can now argue whether this level of granularity is unnecessarily complicated. However: it's hard to argue that the three cases that I listed are too many rules, yet it's easy to see that they can cause too many signs using the OP's design. Such a simplification made the point much clearer, but I should have made that explicit.
      • gknoy 12y ago
        Electronic signs. - Free parking (5 hours remaining) - No Parking (4.5 hours remaining) Of course, that has its own problems, (Power, vandalism, bugs ...) but it would help drivers a LOT. As the article said, no one cares about WHY they can't park, usually. It's only "can I park here right now?" that matters in most cases.
        • dalke 12y ago
          While true, the second most important thing is "can I park here for as long as I need?" "Free parking (1h 45m remaining)" doesn't help if you want to park for 2 hours and don't know if the next time period is "no parking" or "max 1 hour parking". The third most important thing is likely knowing about some time in the future, like "will my visiting friend be able to park here on Saturday evening?"
    • nashashmi 12y ago
      In addition, - you cannot park here on such and such time for street cleaning. - you cannot park here on such and such time for rush hour - you cannot park here on such and such time for snow removal. Plus there are license plates that are sometimes given permission to illegally park based on the reasons not to park.
• BrianEatWorld 12y ago
  I think it has to do with maximizing revenue, not necessarily by tricking drivers, but by using paid/free parking as a way to change driver incentives. One example would be Downtown Austin. There are streets that are closed down to allow for maximum pedestrian traffic, but this is only at night. During the day, the parking is needed for people who have business in the downtown area. However, to discourage too many drivers, the parking during weekdays is paid. On the margin, this will discourage some potential drivers and they will take alternate methods of transportation. On the weekends, when the downtown non-retail businesses are closed, there is no longer the need to discourage drivers. At this point, you want to encourage retail traffic, which means making parking free. Now, whether all this incentive manipulation is worth it, is another story, but I believe the above is the rationale for having multiple rules. In many cities, there is also street sweeping to consider. I know that is the particular reason that has caught out many of my friends in LA.
  • VLM 12y ago
    >and they will take alternate methods of transportation More likely they simply will not go there, or will visit another location (drive to the burbs, etc). There is another interesting aspect of the parking problem that hasn't been discussed, which is the environmental damage parking regulations cause. If you're not a $250K/yr programmer on the coasts, a $95 parking ticket is an expensive surprise, and equivalent to at least 200 miles of driving. So, if parking tickets are expensive and a uncontrollable confusopoly cost of living, its cheaper / safer / more predictable to simply drive out to the burbs, where theres usually a better selection of businesses anyway. Which wastes a lot of gas. I can afford the tickets, and there's plenty of dying retail downtown where I work, but I don't want to deal with getting tickets, paying tickets, getting towed, I live in the burbs anyway, so the downtown loses a lot of economic activity and the environment loses because of extra driving. But the priority is people aren't driving downtown. Sort of a stealth zoning, this area not fit for retail, but we'll categorize it as retail anyway. This also fits into the "high cost of being poor" concept where I might save $100 on rent on paper by living downtown in a bad area, but if the stealth tax of $95 of monthly parking tickets is applied, plus the hassle, I'm better off in the burbs.
• wernercd 12y ago
  Why make the rules complicated? So you can make more money from the lawless idiots! Of course! Same reason for Red Light Cameras and Speed Cameras. Safety? Maybe as a side effect... but we need those monies to make up for budget shortfalls!!! Throw in Business Hours, school zones, happy hour, etc... Also... the US is stupidly enshrined in making everything against the law - and punishable with fines (or more)... For being the Land of the Free, we sure do love our laws...
  • sukilot 12y ago
    School zones, really?
• TheCoelacanth 12y ago
  What about times when you aren't allowed to park at all? For instance, to use the space as an extra traffic lane during rush hour or to allow street cleaning.
• chollida1 12y ago
  Well the biggest difference is that the dutch signs would completely fail to communicate the parking restrictions for a busy street. Its not uncommon for streets to allow parking but not at night or during rush hours so that all lanes can be used for traffic. For instance the usual restrictions are no parking before 6am and then no parking between 7 and 9am and then no parking between 4 and 6pm and then no parking after midnight. The dutch signs are fine for sleepy towns but wouldn't be acceptable for a city.
  • gpvos 12y ago
    Those signs are from our largest cities (500k-800k inhabitants). We just don't have such complicated restrictions, probably because we have a stronger separation between through roads and parking space. We just don't have any parking space that is used as a traffic lane during rush hours; if you can park at all in a multiple-lane street, the space tends to be clearly separated. Street cleaning happens during the day; cleaners just have to deal with traffic and parked cars.
  • ptaipale 12y ago
    There are busy streets in Holland as well. Such more complex restrictions are perfectly possible with the Dutch style signs. Northern Europe goes by traffic signs adhering to Vienna convention, and while rules are not always that simple, getting the basic message does not require you to read the local language. The signs are standardised within nations, and not that different across nations in EU. Let's take an example (Google Maps link below). The round sign with blue background with red stripe over it is "no parking", and the additional sign below says "payment required during 9-20 hours weekdays, 16-20 hours Saturdays, 16-20 hours Sundays, other times free parking", then "price zone 2, maximum parking time with payment is 2 hours", then "free parking with resident parking permit for zone H". And the blue sign is "payment machine that way". https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.178388,24.927116,3a,15y,18.47h,85.63t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sadqPF96EiZs_YgVUw77VlQ!2e0?hl=fi https://www.google.fi/maps/@60.178388,24.927116,3a,15y,18.47...
• mszyndel 12y ago
  Given how simple parking signs are anywhere in Europe I wonder why they complicated them so much in US...?
  • sukilot 12y ago
    US is so car-heavy that they overload you road system.
• gefh 12y ago
  The cynic in me says the signs are confusing because it increases revenue. But then I may be ascribing to malice that which is the result of incremental institutional incompetence.
  • acheron 12y ago
    It can be two things. Personally I would doubt that the signage was made purposefully confusing out of "malice". But any attempt to simplify it, now that it exists, will have to deal with a "but it will decrease revenue" excuse.
  • rayiner 12y ago
    I don't know why you'd ascribe it to incompetence. Why is it incompetent to disallow parking, e.g. during rush hour but not during other hours? Or to disallow parking during street sweeping hours? Or to accommodate truck loading/unloading hours for adjacent retail, or bus loading/unloading hours for nearby schools? Parking rules are just time-domain multiplexing of conflicting uses of parking lanes. Some of the complaints here are classic "lazy programmer" reaction to unavoidable complexity--make the solution easier by solving a different problem. Sometime's that's the right approach, but someone isn't incompetent for choosing a more complex solution that solves a problem more precisely.
    • sukilot 12y ago
      Parent said he signs are malicious, not be rules. The signs are he programmer laziness, not being arsed to solve he problem, just piling on special cases and overloading the framework.
    • grandalf 12y ago
      If there were some incentive for municipalities to install unambiguous signage, we could be confident there wasn't a perverse incentive. But no citizen can actually protest a parking ticket on the grounds of bad signage.
      • rayiner 12y ago
• mattlutze 12y ago
  These are great for the individual case where a single rule exists. That big stack of signs in the beginning of the article is there because there's different traffic control being used at different times during the week. Whether good or bad, they've gone the route of drilling their statistical analyses down to parts of week days (and school day or holiday, in some cases) to determine traffic flow and how parked cars effects it. Not saying one is better than the other. Just, that the systems that result come from different initial conditions.
• imgabe 12y ago
  There's just a lot of variables you have to consider: holidays, resident permits (people who live there are allowed to park for free and/or for an unlimited time), rush hour lanes during week days, street cleaning schedules, and so on.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• maljx 12y ago
  Example from Berlin: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2764486/temp/berlin_parking.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2764486/temp/berlin_park...
• mapster 12y ago
  City services need to operate, and they get first dibs on curb access. Street cleaning for example occurs between 3am-5am every Thursday on Greene St., so this restricts curb parking during that time. etc etc. I imagine that all other city and maybe county departments have say as well. End result: parking rules can be archaic for urban cities.
  • jameshart 12y ago
    It may be surprising, but the whole thing of cities restricting parking on odd or even days for street sweeping, plowing, marching bands, or whatever, simply doesn't happen in many countries. Many cities simply get by without such complex restrictions. Equally, the US municipal government system where every layer from borough to city to county to state to federal has full legislative authority over the detailed minutiae of parking regulation is also not a law of physics that applies universally.
• army 12y ago
  The additional rules are normally from valid considerations, e.g.: * Whether its ok to stop temporarily depends on how busy the road is. * The parking spots are on a major road that has a lot of traffic from commuters - you need the extra lane at certain times. * The parking spots are near a school or other attraction that has predictable bursts of parking demand. You can resolve some of this by being overly restrictive about parking, but that's a suboptimal solution. If the parking spots are near businesses then I can guarantee that there will be lobby groups very unhappy with the suboptimal solution.
  • kuschku 12y ago
    For that we also have different signs. There is a completely different sign for no stopping, with its own, seperate times.
• kw71 12y ago
  When I was a newcomer to Holland (and Europe in general) I found this confusing because it was not stated that parking is free during other times. I had another confusion because of my ignorance of the language. A light up sign at an intersection in Leidschendam: "Tunnel afgesloten - ga rechtdoor" with the path to the tunnel on the right. I recognized "tunnel closed, go right..." but it really means "go right through," in other words, "go straight."
  • Someone 12y ago
    Free parking is the default. Why would they need to complicate the message by adding that? But that is cultural. This problem isn't limited to parking signs. For example, see http://port-orange.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/No_U_Turn.jpg http://port-orange.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/No_U_Turn.j... or https://janiceheck.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/ped-xing.jpg https://janiceheck.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/ped-xing.jpg I cannot imagine there can be people with a driver's license who do not understand those signs, yet can understand the text below it, and have time to read them while driving by at 40 mph. I would leave out the 'helpful' text or if that's legally problematic, think before ordering the sign, and get a single sign that includes the label. That's cheaper, and makes the world look a bit nicer (does anybody have statistics on # of traffics signs per capita or per mile of road? I expect the USA to score high in both)
    • mynameisvlad 12y ago
      > Free parking is the default But how would someone visiting/freshly immigrating there know that if it's not displayed somewhere?
      • Someone 12y ago
        How would he (s)he know to stop on red lights, not drink and drive, stop for pedestrians at crosswalks, give right of way to traffic from the right, drive on the right side of the way, indicate change of direction, not drive after drinking alcohol, etc? Before you know it, the street is full of signs, and drivers haven't time left to attend to the traffic (actually, that might explain the relatively high number of traffic deaths in the USA) When you visit another country and intend to drive a car, you have to spend some time studying the local traffic rules. Also, AFAIK, free parking is the default all over the world.
• ams6110 12y ago
  I have to disagree that the green and red bars are easier to understand than simple written signs e.g: No parking: 10pm-6am 1 hour parking: 6am-10pm Red/Green is first of all a terrible choice as it's a very common form of color blindness. Yes the red areas also have diagonal bars but the meaning of those may not be understood. I know I would need to stop and study a sign like that to understand it. This is an example of something that looks pretty but is actually useless, like a lot of design trends lately.
  • encoderer 12y ago
    Totally disagree. Yes, in your very simple example, it's possible the current format is easier to understand. But the point is, it's seldom as easy as "no parking 10-6". You would need to "stop and study" the sign the first time you see one. After that, it looks like every day planner used in school and business, paper and app alike.
  • ubernostrum 12y ago
    Red/Green is first of all a terrible choice as it's a very common form of color blindness. Oh, goody, I get to teach colorblindness again! The "common form of color blindness" which is usually referred to as "red-green colorblindness" actually does not tend to affect the ability to distinguish red from green. In fact, many people who have this condition -- properly known as deuteranomlous trichromacy or deuteranomaly -- have it without ever realizing it (I didn't know until one day during an eye exam I was given an Ishihara test, and until that point had never had difficulty telling red from green traffic lights, red stop signs from green grass, etc.). Deuteranomaly involves production of an altered form of γ-photopsin, which is the photoreceptor protein typically associated with "green" in RGB color vision. This causes a shift in the wavelengths to which it responds, so that the overlap between it and ρ-photopsin ("red") becomes greater. This does not remove the ability to perceive green, but does affect the ability to distinguish hues which fall into the wavelengths in that overlapping area of the spectrum. An easy way to imagine this effect is to consider a square of pure red projected onto a blank wall, and then introduction of increasing amounts of green into it. The square will move from appearing red to appearing orange to appearing yellow (yellow being made up of red and green in equal amounts). At the point where "normal" color vision would see equal amounts of red and green producing yellow, deuteranomalous color vision will still see slightly more red than green and thus perceive it as still slightly orange. To cause difficulty distinguishing red from green, an impairment would have to be uncommonly severe, or would have to involve some form of dichromacy (where only two, rather than all three, sets of cones -- red, green, blue -- are present/functioning).
• oxryly1 12y ago
  As an aside, when you decide to use 24:00 instead of 0:00?
  • pluma 12y ago
    Likely the same way it's done in every country that uses the 24 hours system (rather than the mostly Anglophile 12 hour system): If it's used to indicate the end of the day, such as the end of a time range within that day, use 24:00. Anywhere else, use 0:00. For example, if you want to say "free parking between 10 pm and midnight": 22:00 - 24:00 If you want to say "free parking from midnight to 3 am": 00:00 - 03:00 I hear in Japan train schedules actually use (or used?) numbers higher than 24 for the edge case of needing to indicate "3 am of the next day", e.g. 22:00 - 27:00, but I've never seen that elsewhere. In Germany that would simply be "22:00 - 03:00" with the date change implied (for timespans equal to or larger than 24 hours you would need to indicate the dates in question anyway, so it's not ambiguous). In short: "Friday, 24:00" is equivalent to "Saturday, 00:00" but implies you're talking about something that happens on Friday (such as a deadline ending "Friday night").
• blutz 12y ago
  I live in LA and almost all of the timed/paid restrictions are really simple: the cost never changes (it's almost always $1/hour) and I think the signs are fairly clear and well-designed. Ignore the "1 minute" (the "minute" was a printer error; it was supposed to be "hour") but this is as complicated as the signs get: https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/1-minute-parking.jpg https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/1-minute-parki... All the other restrictions are mostly special cases: * Street cleaning (weekly for a few hours) * Rush hour no-stopping (because drivers tend to stop/wait on busy streets) * Rush hour no-parking (often used to switch a lane to/from parking) * School zone loading-only during pick-up/drop-off times * Loading-only (or taxi) zones during busy bar nights (Friday/Saturday nights) * Permit parking exemptions (so people who live near business districts aren't subjected to timed restrictions) * Permit-only parking * Limiting overnight parking * Temporary no-parking/no-stopping (used a lot for road work and filming) * Special-class parking (cars with someone who has a walking handicap, car-sharing programs, etc.) Then other distinctions that are important (that often don't get communicated on redesigned signs) are: * Ticket vs tow-away * Ticket cost increases (LA has "anti-gridlock zones" that double the fines during rush hours) * How to pay (e.g. for areas with centralized meters or maybe pay-by-phone) * * * Each of those special-case restrictions has a good purpose (theoretically the city has determined they'll be somehow beneficial) so to make parking simpler, they'll either need to do away with special cases or expand them to make parking more restrictive. In addition, most signs come from a template and it's probably much easier / more cost effective to just grab a sign off a stack or just fill in a template. After I saw these signs, I thought they were a great idea but after looking around where I actually park, they would make parking much more confusing. The sign outside my apartment says "No parking 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. Thursdays, Street cleaning" and the nearby business district has "2 hour parking M-F 8 a.m. - 8 p.m. and Weekends 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.". Most of the huge/confusing signs you find pictures of online are 1-2 normal restrictions stacked with a lot of single-day temporary signs. (I'm guessing a lot of construction/movies buy signs that say "no parking" with a single weekday and it's easier to buy two, one for Friday and one for Saturday, than it is to custom-make one with "Friday & Saturday".) Keep in mind that these signs are in addition to other roadway markings like painted curbs, painted meters (short-term parking meters are often painted a different color), and flashing parking meters (most LA parking meters have a flashing light during a restricted parking period). Also drivers need to be able to scan the parking signs when they're going 10-20mph so color codes and large symbols often help to know when a restriction starts/ends. The majority of the time, parking signs are very clear and seem well designed. Some of the worst cases (say 3+ restrictions) may benefit from redesigned signs. I guess we'll have to see them in use and live with them for a bit to make a better judgement