Parking tickets suck, especially when you feel like you just fell victim to some sort of elaborate psychological trap intent on making you cough up your cash. Don’t abuse yourself trying to make sense of the next two sentences: No stopping 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., except Saturday and Sunday. Two-hour parking Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Los Angeles parking signs are notoriously hard to read, doubly so when you are behind the wheel of a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic. To alleviate some stress from the day of an average Angeleno driver, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation is conducting trials on a newly designed, easy-to-read parking sign.
The design puts into use some clever visual implementations. Most noticably, the complicated text has been almost entirely translated into graphical representation. Days are given columns, usually one for weekdays, Saturday, and Sunday. Chunks of time split these columns into rows. If parking is allowed, the chunk is colored green. If not, it is colored red. Basically, all a driver has to do is locate the section of time on the given day and see if it is red or green to know whether it is ok or not for them to park in that spot.
The new parking signs will be installed Downtown on Spring and Main Streets between 2nd and 9th Streets, according to the Parking Sign Pilot Program website.
The program will last for six months, after which the signs will either be reassessed for improvement or spread throughout the city, depending on results.
“Los Angeles is the first metropolitan city in the country to test out these revolutionary signs with the goal of decreasing parking citations due to misunderstandings created by confusing signs,” reads the website.
Drivers can now rest easy—apparently, the city is not out to get you.
