NEW YORK—Parking in midtown Manhattan will be smoother after 6,300 old signs are replaced with new, easier to read signs.
“They were making drivers crazy,” Councilman Dan Garodnick said of the old signs. “People actually think that the city is deliberately trying to confuse them in order to give them more tickets, and that perception alone is a problem.”
“We never want to play ‘gotcha’ with New York City drivers,” he added.
Larger signs with less words and colors are some of the features of the new signs. Wordage will be cut from about 250 words to 140.
Garodnick unveiled the change on Monday with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, and Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the city’s Department of Transportation.
Quinn said the new change will save drivers money by resulting in less parking tickets.
“How many of us have gone back to our cars, and seen that dreaded parking ticket in the window and thought, ‘Wait a minute, the sign said I could park here!’” she said.
It’s hard to tell if less parking tickets will be given out, resulting in less revenue, said Sadik-Khan, but it’s less a matter of a tremendous amount of tickets and more “a tremendous amount of frustration.”
The signs haven’t been changed for decades, she said.
