I went on a sign photography spree
For reasons, I recently went into a part of the city known for particularly confusing and bad parking signs and photographed a bunch of them.
Los Angeles has uniquely terrible parking signs. Sometimes you'll see a pole with four or so different panels on it, each outlining a different set of rules which must be compared and overlapped. Parking is the worst in areas where district parking permits overlap with public infrastructure like schools, hospitals, police stations, and commercial loading areas.
Anyway, here's the most irritating sign I photographed. Can you figure out when it is legal to park here for more than 20 minutes?
Yes, the answer is: 11pm to midnight, every single day!! Why??? No clue. I saw some signs which were worse, complexity- and size-wise... but this one was the most annoying to me, on principle, because of the weird timing gap.
This very old news article depicts a ten panel high sign which was once erected in the same neighborhood where I was photographing. It was apparently so annoying when it first went up in 2014 that it was immediately replaced by a clearer, smaller set of signs. However, the school still has a couple four-panel-high parking signs around it.
There was an effort at some point over a decade ago to replace some of LA's signs with smaller signs using a different graphical technique to condense the information. In my experience, though, this replacement basically has not happened in any meaningful way. Almost all signs in the city are these multi-sign agglomerations. They are clearly a lot easier to assemble - instead of reprinting a specific sign unique to each point on the block, you can just keep adding signs to any given pole, and leave the public with the job of combining the information present at any location.
Anyway my big recommendation is: don't fucking drive if you don't absolutely have to!!!!!! This is how I avoid parking stress! At this point, about 80% of the time I'm driving, I'm parking at a train station and getting on the train. Whenever I have to park on the street and check these signs, I've already lost.