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While the people on the street don't seem too impressed with the city's experimental color-coded parking signs, Eric Jaffe at the Atlantic's CityLab is definitely a fan. They are, he writes, the "Least. Confusing. Parking sign. Ever." More from Jaffe below.
He does fall into a trap that some enthusiasts and media observers seem to be making, of only comparing the new single green-and-red grid approach designed by a Brooklyn woman to the absurd stacks of parking restrictions that you sometimes see around LA. In other words, the extreme cases. I think the more apt test for most drivers — and it's only drivers that matter on this, right — will be which style is clearer while in the car and actively hunting for a space: the new color-coded grids or a simple, single text-driven sign like you mostly see. The current signs, when not stacked with all kinds of exceptions, have large enough type that drivers can tell at a glance which day the street-sweeping ban is in effect, the tow-away hours and how many hours you can park without a ticket. Those are the biggies most drivers need to know quickly. The new signs compress all the details and exceptions into a logical color-coded grid that make the 7-day span of rules really clear when you are standing under them reading. Once we all get used to them, the color coding by day and time might work great at a glance, but I haven't put the new signs to use on the street yet so I don't know how they work for actual drivers. There are about 100 of the signs being tested along Spring Street downtown.
An excerpt from Jaffe's piece:
On Friday, the city unveiled new "easy-to-read" parking signs that are actually easy to read. The "grid-style" signs rely on color coding and graphic representations rather than words—a perfect fit for the age of emoticons. So long as drivers know the time and the day of the week, and that green is good and red is bad, it's hard to see them getting confused by these design gems.
Officials will place the new signs alongside existing ones during a six-month trial downtown, though it's hard to see them not eventually making their way across the whole city. In addition to clarity, the signs feature Bluetooth beacons capable of transmitting parking (or other) information to a driver's smartphone. The city says the beacons could ultimately be paired with apps that offer payment options or "neighborhood event notifications."
By the way, the signs' designer, Nikki Sylianteng, says on her parking blog that parking signs cannot use copyrighted designs so she is making hers available for free to any city that wants to use it.
Add CityLab: The site also has a map up data-visualizing all of the recorded UFO sightings by Americans since 1933. It's an earnest writeup but the map doesn't reveal any useful pattern except to confirm the obvious — UFO sightings correlate with where people live.
