Urban Transport

One woman's design challenge: Build a better parking sign

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To Park or Not To Park: making cities more human friendly, one parking sign at a time
To Park or Not To Park: making cities more human friendly, one parking sign at a time
Solid colors: no good for colorblind drivers
To Park or Not To Park: making cities more human friendly, one parking sign at a time
Experimenting with different labelling for the time scales
Printed and laminated parking signs
Redesigned parking sign, put up beneath the original sign with public comments (and stolen marker)
Experimenting with subtle hatching - less busy for fully sighted viewers but still usable for the colorblind
Prototyping a new street parking sign design
Trying to decipher an existing parking sign
To Park or Not To Park: making cities more human friendly, one parking sign at a time
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Like many design projects, this one starts with the simple question "how can we fix this?" Parking regulations in big cities are complex and confusing, and public parking signage can take so long to decipher that you have to wonder if revenue raising is the goal behind it all. Nikki Sylianteng, living in New York City, is on a one-woman crusade to make parking signs more human-friendly, using a visual design approach and some late-night guerrilla tactics to help improve usability in her neighborhood.

I think most people can agree that parking signs are confusing. They're confusing in the UK, they're confusing in Asia, they're confusing in Quebec, they're really confusing in Australia, and despite a fairly recent overhaul, they're still pretty confusing in New York City.

One resident of the Big Apple, designer Nikki Sylianteng, is on a mission to try to make these necessary evils a little more human-friendly, using a much more visual method than the typical "wall of text" style parking signs.

To Park or Not To Park: making cities more human friendly, one parking sign at a time

Sylianteng's design is a visual calendar-styled series of bars, each bar representing one or more days with a unique parking schedule, and the side column dividing each day up into time blocks. The theory is that as you read the sign, you zero in on the day and time, and get a straight up answer to whether you're allowed to park, and for how long – instead of having to wade through great chunks of information that's totally irrelevant.

Sylianteng has been iterating designs since February this year, and in an act of "functional graffiti," she's been printing and laminating her parking schedules and sticking them up under municipal parking signs with a pen attached and a feedback box for users to comment in.

But moving to a more visual style has its own issues. For example, early versions in flat red and white were unreadable to red/green colorblind drivers, so new versions were made that include subtle hatching.

Solid colors: no good for colorblind drivers

And while the visual signs do a superb job with relatively simple parking conditions, it remains to be seen if they can handle some of the extremely specific, complex and overlapping parking rules that arise in a big city – i.e. the ones that were creating the biggest problems to start with.

But Sylianteng is up for the challenge. Through her "To Park or Not To Park" project website, she's asking people to nominate confusing parking signs in their area by taking a photo and e-mailing it in. She'll create a visual parking schedule, print it out and post it back to you so you can stick it up under the existing sign, and hopefully help cut down on a few parking tickets as well as making your neighborhood a touch more human-friendly.

Redesigned parking sign, put up beneath the original sign with public comments (and stolen marker)

As for whether something like this could eventually be rolled out to replace the million-plus parking signs currently up in New York City, that's doubtful. Designer Michael Bierut, partner in charge of Pentagram, the agency that did the redesign project in 2013, found his task hindered by the "somewhat archaic regulations that govern US traffic signs."

But Sylianteng's approach has an interesting twist – as it's a project of pure design passion, she's not operating under any such regulations. And her proactive approach of sticking her designs up as translations of the existing signage has the potential to build some public momentum behind it – the kind of momentum that could result in regulatory changes, if enough people get involved. As fans of human-friendly design, we appreciate her efforts and wish her success.

View gallery - 10 images
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9 comments
Brian M
Wasn't sure at first as it looked more confusing - but have looked again and yes its a lot clearer! Won't work in the UK though were parking fines are a means of revenue!
John Sorensen
Looks like a wonderful idea. Now sit back and watch some bureaucratic douche slam her for littering or posting unauthorized signs.
Satweavers
The graphic timeline is nice, but I'd have to get out of my car and walk right up to it to read the fine print. But, then again, I have to do that with the current parking signs.
Milton
This is leaps and bounds better than what we currently have. I love it!
b2p
Further simplify and make more readable by: 1. Show no P with circle or circle with line. No parking is simply cross hatched and parking ok is solid. 2. Show yellow for limited parking and enlarge the number to show hours limitation to be more readable. 3. Show dark green for periods of free parking and to differentiate from the yellow for the color blind.
Buzzclick
Permitted parking should have a happy face and no parking a sourpuss. Just like the street lights; red for no, yellow for yes-but, and green for OK. If we have to consider the color blind, the crosshatch idea is a good one. I think Ms. Sylianteg's ideas are definitely an improvement. I have been in situations where I got a ticket because I thought I had understood the signs and moved my car from a good spot to a bad one!
@Brian M- parking fines are a lucrative source of revenue for all big cities. They all want a piece of us.
Wombat56
Excellent idea. I think there's room to make some of the time and week day text larger and more readable, while keeping the same sign size.
Nairda
People seem to be forgetting that the point of a confusing sign is to generate more revenue through misinterpretation.
Just like when vehicle registration stickers no longer had to be displayed on windscreens, and people were getting fines left right and center for lapsing. I know I 'donated' at least a few hundreds dollars to that cause.
Slowburn
Use blue instead of green.