Maybe I'll finally remember the street sweeping schedule

April 7, 2015 11:14 AM

The traditional sidewalk parking sign can be confusing, particularly when mixed with a bevy of municipal regulations. Redesigns have tried to make them easier to read, but when designer Nikki Sylianteng got a parking ticket in New York she decided to come up with a more radical rethink. Los Angeles liked her design so much they're now rolling it out for real.
posted by selfnoise (32 comments total)

How about a sign that's obfuscated to be easy to understand but on second glance makes no sense whatsoever?
posted by Foci for Analysis at 11:19 AM on April 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

I want these in Chicago. Also may unintentionally help students be better at making and reading graphs.
posted by AlexiaSky at 11:25 AM on April 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

That's still really confusing to me, and I like charts. It's simplicity also makes it incorrect - there's no standing on school days, not M-F. There are many Mondays through Fridays that are not school days.

One comment in the Gawker article has a great example of a street near a school zone with very complex parking rules, with two different types of exempt permits, that can't be simply captured in a 2d grid.
posted by muddgirl at 11:25 AM on April 7, 2015

I'm inclined to think that parking rules which can't be captured in a 2d grid like this are too complex and ought to be simplified.
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:28 AM on April 7, 2015 [16 favorites]

For NYC, no, these fail on a simple level of being difficult to read from one's car while trying to find a space. At least in the outerboroughs, most spaces don't have a standard M-F schedule, so you'd not only be trying to figure out which columns mean what, but then the timings, while rolling past and pissing off everyone behind you.

Sylianteng seems to be a good designer, and she's identified a problem, but I think this needs a few more drafts before it's going to solve anything.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:30 AM on April 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Since you can pretty much do whatever and park wherever you want in LA if the vehicle remains 'attended' I just bought a Carpool Kenny and leave the flashers on.
posted by carsonb at 11:30 AM on April 7, 2015

Well, her original concept is fairly understandable.

But, the version rolled-out in LA appears to have gone through the committee filter and, as a result, is a bit confusing. For instance, why add a circle-P to the green sections that show parking allowed? But, then, there is no circle-P in the Sunday column. Does that really mean I can park there? Does the circle-P denote it's a 2-hour limit? Why not just have "2-hour" without the P? And, why add stripes to the red, as well as the X?
posted by Thorzdad at 11:33 AM on April 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

It bugs me that the timeline isn't to scale on the version in the last link. The block from 12 to 7 am is the same size as the block from 7 to 8 am, the block from 9 am to 4 pm, etc. Her original version is better at this, but it would be much, much easier to interpret if the sign had a little line marking each hour.
posted by Metroid Baby at 11:37 AM on April 7, 2015

I'm inclined to think that parking rules which can't be captured in a 2d grid like this are too complex and ought to be simplified.

Shouldn't parking rules that are too complicated to be written on one sign be simplified? The redesign solution packs even more information in a smaller space with smaller text.

For instance, why add a circle-P to the green sections that show parking allowed?

Allegedly it means "metered parking" while blank-green means unmetered parking, but search me where that is in the legend.
posted by muddgirl at 11:38 AM on April 7, 2015

why add a circle-P to the green sections that show parking allowed
why add stripes to the red, as well as the X?

Color blindness.
posted by sylvanshine at 11:39 AM on April 7, 2015 [10 favorites]

The total confusion over how metered parking works in the Gawker comments is pretty entertaining. I will have to assume that these people have never parked a car in their entire life.
posted by effbot at 11:39 AM on April 7, 2015

Stripes (and possibly additional symbology such as the circle-P etc.) are absolutely a requirement for this sort of sign in order for them to be useful to people with the most common form of color blindness. My initial reaction to her first draft was "Oh no, yet another designer who doesn't consider accessibility to be important" so I'm very gratified to see the update.
posted by fader at 11:40 AM on April 7, 2015 [3 favorites]

I don't care about the signs, I just want the street cleaning on my block to go back to twice a month instead of the useless once a month it is now. The signs all used to say "2nd and 4th Tuesdays" but now they say "2nd      Tuesdays" with a white sticker covering the "and 4th".
posted by octothorpe at 11:47 AM on April 7, 2015

Shouldn't parking rules that are too complicated to be written on one sign be simplified? The redesign solution packs even more information in a smaller space with smaller text.

Exactly.

I mean, yes, there might be rare situations when one needs a sign clusterfuck like this, but really, one ought not need to do that to information.

When it comes to providing information, more is not better. Just because there are signs up that have all of the information, that doesn't mean that the information is usable.

I basically file things like this in the same mental filing cabinet as all of the terms and conditions that everybody mindlessly clicks "I ACCEPT" for. If the information isn't easy to process, then nobody is going to read it or use it.
posted by entropone at 11:49 AM on April 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Simpler parking rules + intelligible signs = lower municipal revenues

So I predict this WON'T catch-on.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 11:54 AM on April 7, 2015 [7 favorites]

There are signs in Santa Monica near my doctor's office that I have a great deal of trouble parsing, and I do pretty well with word problems. This will simplify that a lot.
posted by solmssen at 12:08 PM on April 7, 2015

I don't care about the signs, I just want the street cleaning on my block to go back to twice a month instead of the useless once a month it is now. The signs all used to say "2nd and 4th Tuesdays" but now they say "2nd Tuesdays" with a white sticker covering the "and 4th".
posted by octothorpe at 2:47 PM on April 7 [+] [!]

I've never seen anyone wish to move their car more in my life. New thing of the day!
posted by edbles at 12:12 PM on April 7, 2015

I've never seen anyone wish to move their car more in my life. New thing of the day!

A clean street is a happy street.

plus we have a garage
posted by octothorpe at 12:20 PM on April 7, 2015

The great thing about street sweeping is that an out of towner can sliiiide in at just after the ending time and gank a daylong parking space from all the poor, downtrodden city dwellers.

Yes, I am a terrible person. But it works!
posted by selfnoise at 12:23 PM on April 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

No day-long parking spaces in my neighborhood without a resident's permit sticker, you damn suburbanite.
posted by octothorpe at 1:10 PM on April 7, 2015

I think some of the crazier rules have more to do with neighborhoods lobbying to keep non-residents from parking there at key times than they do with some nefarious budget-driven plot. It's not that those don't exist or that I discount the possibility, but you have to take LA's crazy urban planning and the general willingness to activism of its residents into account as well.
posted by feloniousmonk at 1:45 PM on April 7, 2015

I always thought the signs and rules were convoluted on purpose, to increase ticket revenue.

(I live in Chicago, can you tell?)
posted by jeweled accumulation at 1:53 PM on April 7, 2015

This all presumes that the city wants the parking rules to be clear. But parking tickets are a terrific source of city revenue. Particularly in California where various state laws make it very difficult to raise taxes or fees.
posted by Nelson at 2:02 PM on April 7, 2015

"Are we after midnight or before midnight right now? It's before midnight, but it's also after midnight. It's always before midnight and it's always after midnight."
posted by Rhaomi at 2:40 PM on April 7, 2015

Someone should write an app that lets you photograph a sign and it will respond YES or NO plus an amount of time until that changes. Better still, add a QR code to the sign and let a car's built in computer inform you on the dashboard.
posted by Obscure Reference at 2:54 PM on April 7, 2015 [2 favorites]

Someone should write an app that lets you photograph a sign

"We are in the early stages of experimenting with the future digital presentation of signage. We are installing two types of Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) beacons on the signs as a foundation for future services to smartphones and connected vehicles. These beacons will allow app developers to create future, opt-in services to aid people in parking and even discover useful information about what's around them."

(the QR code on the signs links to that page, via an LA-branded bit.ly alias)
posted by effbot at 3:11 PM on April 7, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think some of the crazier rules have more to do with neighborhoods lobbying to keep non-residents from parking there at key times than they do with some nefarious budget-driven plot.

Yeah, it's worth noting that all you really have to do to get permit parking rolled out in your neighborhood is to get X% of your fellow homeowners to sign off on it. So, if parking on your neighborhood is confusing because of permits, you probably live in a rental and the people who own places (with driveways!) there have made it that way on purpose.

"2hrs without a permit" combined with a 4hr a week street sweeping related No Parking block describes the far majority of LA's parking situation. Unless the driver literally cannot read, there aren't really that many confusing places to park in Los Angeles.
posted by sideshow at 3:43 PM on April 7, 2015

We have resident permit parking mostly because we live a couple blocks from a stadium so without restrictions, the whole area would turn into a giant drunken tailgate before every football game or Luke Brian concert.
posted by octothorpe at 3:50 PM on April 7, 2015

I think some of the crazier rules have more to do with neighborhoods lobbying to keep non-residents from parking there at key times than they do with some nefarious budget-driven plot.

This is a pain point in the neighborhood where I work. It's a mixed commercial/residential neighborhood. Literally on one block there is my office, a used car lot, a gas station (with a U-Haul location), a tattoo parlor, and a bunch of houses. None of these business have their own parking (except the car lot and U-Haul, where they store their vehicles). The residents constantly complain that we're parking in front of their houses on the street (unregulated parking). I get their frustration, but I'm not sure what they expected when they moved into this kind of neighborhood. And I'm also not clear what exactly we're supposed to do. We can just keep parking further and further away, to change which neighbors we piss off, but that just moves the problem. It would be great if public transit were an option for everyone here, but it's just not. The fact of the matter is, parking pain is one of the tradeoffs for living in a dense neighborhood where you can walk to lots of stores, bars, and restaurants (and tattoo parlors). So it annoys me that people complain about it.
posted by primethyme at 4:52 PM on April 7, 2015

Street cleaning is and always will be a fucking racket. Here in Oakland the city makes several hundred dollars a week on my street alone. We have street cleaning twice a week, every week so a machine can roll on by while piles of trash accumulate on the sidewalk.

The biggest problem with street cleaning signs is that they're not legible, you can't read them from further away. This looks like an effort to make it look like they're solving the problem, but in reality they only benefit from it being worse.
posted by quirkyturky at 5:00 PM on April 7, 2015

I must be different, I find it easier to understand the old way.
posted by Pembquist at 5:09 PM on April 7, 2015

effbot: "I will have to assume that these people have never parked a car in their entire life."

...or just live in a city where this isn't an issue. I grew up in Houston, and I never had to deal with any of this because 99% of the time, the place you're trying to park has a parking lot in front. Like, I think I parked on the side of the street where there was a parking sign once in the three years I drove there.

I'm not saying it's better. Lots more sprawl, less public transportation, etc., etc. Just saying that not being able to parse parking signs doesn't necessarily indicate "doesn't drive".
posted by Bugbread at 5:47 PM on April 7, 2015