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.
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.
You can run convenience stores and bars solely on walk in traffic, but there's more to life than doritos and getting drunk, or there should be. The destruction of brick and mortar retail by online will have some interesting effects... Now, or certainly in the future, I could live in a city without a car and unable to visit (closed/closing) retail shops as long as UPS still delivers "the good stuff"
Lack of competition also has a stealth tax on the residents. Why sell a banana for less than $5 if you're the only banana seller in walking distance. In car country the market is more competitive so I may burn $1 of gas to go shopping, but I'll save 50% on a bag of groceries so its a huge net win as long as my bag of groceries costs more than $2 or so.
Strongly disagree. In Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood, there's a block with not one, but two shops that sell only chess sets and things related to chess. Old, walkable downtowns (the ones that have survived the advent of the car, at least) have just as much diversity of retail businesses as the homogenous suburbs (where you have your Best Buy, your Walmart, your Olive Garden, and so on), if not more.
Plenty of midsize cities worldwide work on various combination of mass transit, automobiles, walking, and bicycles. The automobile monoculture in most midsize American cities is a product of our early development of cheap automobiles combined with federal policies massively subsidizing highways and the racial paroxysms of the mid-20th century.
Even Canadian midsize cities, which in many ways are very similar to those in USA (except for far worse weather) have far higher transit usage. In Calgary, 'the Dallas of Canada', full of oil money & newly-built single-family homes, 24.3% of commuters use transit, and that's considered low! http://www.calgaryjournal.ca/index.php/news/2538-calgary-s-t...
Likewise, newly built Dutch suburbs have many features that resemble American suburbia, but have good bike lanes and acceptable bus transit: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/01/15/dutch-suburbs-are-like...
Manhattan is still dependent on transit because it's one of the few places in America that's so dense, even 60 years of dedicated auto-first policy couldn't change the facts on the ground.
Plenty of midsize cities worldwide work on various combination of mass transit, automobiles, walking, and bicycles. The automobile monoculture in most midsize American cities is a product of our early development of cheap automobiles combined with federal policies massively subsidizing highways and the racial paroxysms of the mid-20th century.
Even Canadian midsize cities, which in many ways are very similar to those in USA (except for far worse weather) have far higher transit usage. In Calgary, 'the Dallas of Canada', full of oil money & newly-built single-family homes, 24.3% of commuters use transit, and that's considered low! http://www.calgaryjournal.ca/index.php/news/2538-calgary-s-t...
Likewise, newly built Dutch suburbs have many features that resemble American suburbia, but have good bike lanes and acceptable bus transit: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/01/15/dutch-suburbs-are-like...
Manhattan is still dependent on transit because it's one of the few places in America that's so dense, even 60 years of dedicated auto-first policy couldn't change the facts on the ground. But America had many other transit-oriented downtowns & dense neighborhoods, still has a few, and could have more again!
Optimistic at best. Some cites like NY are better equipped for alternate transport, but my experience in California is less than stellar. Although it is my primary transport, outside of a ride between classes in university, I rarely see people my age cycling for non-recreational purposes. No only is there no desire, but most nonresidential streets I ride on have inadequate accommodations for bikes.
Trains in some cities are usable, but the coverage and stop frequency leaves much to be desired. I didn't even bother with the bus in LA. Not only did I have to travel 1 mile to get to the nearest stop, but when I wanted to travel on weekends waiting 40min+ for a bus wasn't worth it. In stark contrast to my experience Seoul which had a fantastic system of buses, trains, and taxis!
The fact that $200,000 houses sit on $800,000+ worth of land in Silicon Valley means that, if policy were changed to allow reasonable density, Silicon Valley would quickly densify to the point that walkable neighborhood retail and mass transit would have a lot of customers. And mass transit needs a lot of customers to run at a reasonable frequency.
Not so. It turns out there was a sticker on the parking meter below bumper level that was basically invisible that said 2hr max. Two parking tickets later (plus a third fron trying to park somewhere else by my building that should have been fine), I hated cities. I could barely afford to eat (ramen profitable) and only drove the bare minimum, and here was this insane expense when I could least afford it. I moved out of the city and didn't spend a dime there for years as a result.
I think means-adjusted fees could be reasonable, but there should be lower and upper limits, particularly for laws where the fees are there to raise revenue or direct behavior, rather than protect the public.
(Yes--I know you can plead your case in front of a judge on some infractions, but the courts aren't as accommodating as they were in the past.)
Time and transportation to the court can be just as difficult for some to obtain as the money for the ticket. If the person in question has a job schedule or medical condition that makes daytime errands more difficult, it's even more discouraging.
In my neck of the woods, It cost's $10 to even begin to contest a ticket.
Fortunately, some (or at least one small one) of the cities around here consider it a central part of the right to due process and a speedy trial that choosing a trial cannot make your situation worse than just paying the fine. So, you can have your day in court, and if you lose, the fine is the same.
Your post would have been just fine without this.
The problem is its an anecdote in a discussion about public policy and lifestyle for 100% of the population, when only 0.03% of the city population can actually visit.
* 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.
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.
- 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
- 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.
- (unsigned, city-wide bylaw) you cannot park anywhere during such hours without a permit unless otherwise indicated
- (unsigned, city-wide bylaw) you cannot park anywhere for more than 3 hours unless otherwise indicated
- you cannot park between the signs (taxi stand/pickup)
- no stopping anytime
- you can not park here on school days
- handicapped parking only
- commercial loading only
- 3 minute passenger loading!
- Taxi-only parking
- Ambulance waiting spot
All of these spots are also "idling police car" spots.
When a sign serves to delineate areas with certain rules using arrows (e.g. no parking past this sign).
- Parking for loading/unloading only
The only example for "irregular" no parking times I've seen in Germany are special exceptions for markets (typically Wednesday and Sunday, but the sign won't tell you if the market is cancelled on a particular day for a particular reason and you won't get towed or fined if you then park there when the market isn't happening) or special occasions (e.g. a circus) where they put up a temporary sign a week in advance.
I guess Germans really are more efficient (while simultaneously being more in love with having rules for every eventuality).
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.
- 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.
"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?"
- When standing is allowed
- Different sets of rules for commercial or permitted vehicles
They could post two of the proposed signs, one for commercial and one for noncommercial vehicles, for example, but standing rules are going to be harder to add to that design without making it more confusing.
Then at least I know that I'm looking at all of the information that pertains to me, and that this information isn't contradictory.
I suppose if you want to put non-parking rules (e.g. idling rules) on a parking sign, and then complain that the parking sign is too complicated, then that's a different problem.
Need temporary exceptions for snow removal? Change the signs. Can't afford to change the signs so often? Don't make so many and complicated exceptions or schedules.
You can make a really reasonable system by only using simple signs in the form "[park here/don't park here/pay-park here] IF [time-range-sign] OTHERWISE default". Many countries are successfully doing this - my home city is just fine and most of the parking signs are either (a) no parking here; (b) pay-parking on workdays 7:00-21:00 (otherwise default free-parking); (c) no-parking on 7:00-19:00 on workdays (to free up a lane for traffic) or (d) parking forbidden except permit #xyz.
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."
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.j... or 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)
But how would someone visiting/freshly immigrating there know that if it's not displayed somewhere?
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.
Until the parking signs were explained to me, I had assumed these meant no parking except during these times, and that everyone parking in the spot should buy parking permission from the machine.
No parking: 10pm-6am
1 hour parking: 6am-10pm
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.
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).
Red-green "blindness" comes in two flavours: protanomaly (red deficiency) and deuteranomaly (green deficiency). Both can vary in their severity.
I'm deuteranomalous, that means I don't perceive green as intensely as someone with normal colour vision. Basically, green always appears much less saturated to me, whether it stands on its own or as part of a hue. This also means browns will appear more "red" to me.
Additionally this means I find it much more difficult to tell "similar" shades of red and green (and the various hues in between) apart, especially when the surfaces are very small. I think this has to do with red and green normally having a difference in luminosity and me relying on the luminosity as an additional "hint" when processing the colours.
Also note that the reason many men with colourblindness remain entirely unaware of it is not that they aren't affected by it but that there simply isn't much awareness of it in popular culture.
My maternal grandfather was a photographer and would often ask his wife for opinions on colour matching and had a tendency to pick atrocious colour combinations for his clothing, but he never thought of himself as being colour blind.
Although there were a few hints in my childhood that I'm colour blind (e.g. painting trunks and leaves in the same colour, using green as a skin colour when painting "brown" people, mixing up blue, purple and turquoise a lot, having difficulties with colour coded maps on the overhead projector) the only reason my parents became aware of it being actual colour blindness (rather than just childish quirkiness) was that we did a couple of health tests in elementary school that included an Ishihara test.
Note that I never had trouble telling apart the colours on traffic lights either, although I must say that with the newer traffic lights that were introduced during my childhood I noticed the green having become much fainter (because they are brighter). It's only now that I've begun driving that I notice that green traffic lights at night frequently blend into the scenery alongside the fluorescent street lights.
EDIT: Here's an article showing the world pretty much as I see it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928770
For anyone wandering by, the full spectrum (pun intended) of things that tend to be called "colorblindness" is:
* Deuteranomaly: most common by far, involves mutated γ-photopsin shifting the peak and range of the "green" response further toward "red".
* Protanomaly: more rare, involves mutated ρ-photopsin shifting the peak and range of the "red" response. Similar effects on ability to distinguish colors, but also "darkens" the far red end of the visible spectrum toward black due to the way it shifts response.
* Tritanomaly: even more rare, involves mutated β-photopsin shifting the peak and range of the "blue" response. Is the only one of these three which is as prevalent in women as men, though, due to the way the genetics works out (deuteranomaly and protanomaly would require a woman to get the mutation on both X chromosomes).
Taken together these are called "anomalous trichromacy" conditions -- all three types of color photoreceptor proteins are produced by cones in the eyes, but not the "normal" forms of each, resulting in a shift of response.
Then there are the dichromacy conditions, where one set of color-distinguishing cone cells is basically completely lacking:
* Deuteranopia = no "green"
* Protanopia = no "red"
* Tritanopia = no "blue"
Deuteranopia and protanopia again affect similar ranges of the spectrum, but protanopia again "darkens" the far end. And tritanopia is, once again, equal prevalence in men and women due to the genetics.
Finally there's monochromacy, where either there are no cones at all (no color, just shades of grey, and usually drastically reduced visual acuity), or only a single type of cones (shades of that color + greys, better visual acuity when in good lighting conditions).
(for a non-technical term I much prefer "green weakness" since it doesn't have the OH MY GOD YOU CAN'T TELL RED AND GREEN APART AT ALL connotations)
(and personally, when I do have problems with color, it tends to be in that yellow-y/beige-y/earth-tone-y bit of the spectrum, much like your experience, and so I wish people would be more careful with those rather than caring about whether red and green are different enough colors)
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.
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.
But no citizen can actually protest a parking ticket on the grounds of bad signage.
Well consider Ferguson, the city with such out of control fines/fees that there are more warrants for the arrest of citizens who owe fees for minor infractions than there are citizens!
Historically governments have had such asymmetric power over individuals that we take for granted that signs are beyond reproach. What is so inspiring about this designer's work is that it is so refreshingly democratic.
A lot of municipalities are also being screwed pretty hard by state-level policies. Many states cap how much a municipality can raise through "legitimate" taxation (eg, property, sales and income taxes) while imposing mandates on what services the municipalities must provide. Meanwhile, municipalities have an even worse time taking on debt than the state government. So it's not too uncommon for a municipality to end up in the position of being unable to meet its obligations, having nothing left to cut, and no authority to raise taxes.
My wife successfully contested an expired meter citation from Fort Worth just a few months ago for that very reason.
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.
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.
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,18.47...
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.
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").
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-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
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...
I want to show you a few signs in comparison, which are Dutch and notify drivers about free or paid parking. Those are (imho) very clear and only show when you need to pay. If you're outside that time frame, it's free:
1. [1] Paid parking all days between 18:00 and 24:00
2. [2] Paid parking from Mondays to Saturdays between 9:00 and 18:00, you're only allowed to stay for two hours max
3. [3] Paid parking from Mondays to Saturdays between 9:00 and 24:00 and on Sundays from 13:00 to 24:00
Am I just crazy, or are those signs way more easier to understand than the graphical green/red bars (especially from a greater distance)? I truly like the designers take to the problem, but isn't it just crazy you have to redesign individual rules to make the time slots understandable?
[1] http://denhaagfm.nl/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Betaald-Parke...
[2] http://www.verkeerskunde.nl/Uploads/Cache/2013/2/13020510502...
[3] http://www.anwb.nl/bestanden/w280/content/gallery/anwb/nieuw...