Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs : Trying to Decipher L.A. Parking? Check Brain at Curb

Thomas Foulk’s silver Honda idled on Esther Avenue near the Westside Pavilion. A single post with three red and green signs hung over his head:

No parking, 10 to noon Friday, Street Cleaning.

No Parking Anytime, Except 2 hour Parking 8 a.m.-6 p.m., Monday-Friday.

Vehicles With No. 26 Permits Exempted. Holidays Enforced.

This was a Thursday afternoon at 3:30. Foulk is a messenger who drives for a living. He also graduated from a university with close to a straight-A average in history. But the parking signs on Esther Avenue seemed harder to decipher than the Japanese radio code in World War II.

Foulk pondered. He does not have a No. 26 permit so he has to pay attention to the signs. It is not a holiday, which doesn’t matter anyway, because the law holds no mercy even on Christmas. It isn’t Friday, so he does not have to worry about street cleaning. He is not planning to stay more than two hours. Three-thirty falls between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. Bingo. He parked.

“I’ve had three tickets in six months and that’s by looking, thinking I understand, making my delivery and coming out to find a ticket,” Foulk said.

Parking is one of the things Angelenos enjoy grousing about, and the proliferation of signs and restrictions is giving them good reason. Einstein could not figure these things out. Determining whether you can leave your car without risking a $28 ticket can require considerable powers of deductive reasoning. And let’s face it, a lot of us can barely balance the checkbook.

“We all pay taxes for these streets, but we can’t park on them. I feel ripped off as a taxpayer. This is just one more abuse. I don’t even want to live here anymore,” Constance Jones muttered from beneath her green parasol. Her mustard Mercedes was parked near the Beverly Center under three signs, each of which she had to read three times before she dared leave her car to audition for a television commercial.

The signs, most of them on the city’s densely populated Westside, are so confusing that even residents who park there every day sometimes get tickets. A meter reader of 15 years admitted she has to read the signs at least twice to figure out whether to write a ticket. The guy in charge of parking enforcement for Los Angeles confessed that, when confronted with similar signage in Annapolis, Md., he was so stumped he parked someplace else.

The cause is known in the trade as “preferential parking districts,” 39 areas throughout Los Angeles where residents compete for parking space with such major “parking generators” as the Beverly Center, UCLA and Melrose Avenue.

The residents petitioned for relief. After a year of hearings and surveys, the city granted them priority parking, in most cases limiting outsiders to two hours during the day and banning them on evenings and weekends.

The explanation seems simple, prompting one to ask why the signs are not.

“We have tried. We have an on-going review of these signs to see if there is a clearer way. But at this point, not a great deal has been simplified,” said Robert Yates, parking administrator for the city Transportation Department.

“They try their darndest to make it simple,” said Alice Lepis, principal transportation engineer, who oversees six other engineers who write the signs. “But people still say to us: ‘Look, I’m a Ph.D. and I can’t understand this.’ I sympathize.”

Sympathy does not go very far with snarling drivers who get tickets. Rumors persist that the city purposely posts confusing signs to generate revenue from fines.

“(County Supervisor) Deane Dana has to have that $75,000 bullet-proof car, and we’ve got to pay for it somehow. Do you believe that?” asked Jimmy Hughes, a Westside resident who petitioned for preferential parking after a 24-hour gym went in around the corner from his home. He still is not happy.

City officials concede that nobody likes the arrangement. Residents have to pay for the permits, usually $8 a year per car. When they have guests over for more than two hours, they have to arrange for special parking stickers. Children’s birthday parties are a real parking hassle.

But parking officials insist that their motive is not to make money, even though the city reports that annual parking revenues have quadrupled to nearly $100 million since 1984.

The revenues shot up steadily after the city instituted an aggressive parking enforcement program under Yates in 1985. Through June of this year, 1.8 million parking tickets were issued in the city’s 465 square miles.

But the city does not see all of the proceeds, Yates said. Only $7.20 of every $20 ticket goes to the general fund. The rest is absorbed by the county, the courts and administrative costs.

On the streets, officers in their tiny trucks say they are motivated not by ticket quotas but by the goal of keeping parking moving in a city that worships cars. Few violator excuses are accepted.

“I still had two minutes left. I was planning to move it. I’m not parked, I’m just stopped,” a parking enforcement officer said one afternoon, reciting 15 years of alibis she has heard. She leaned against her little truck, arms folded, and glared at a group of young people in a white Mustang convertible parked on the sidewalk--a $40 fine.

They were doing some fast talking. “We’re not really parked. We were just leaving. These guys in the back are from Boston.”

The officer drummed her frosted white fingernails on her ticket machine. They kept talking. She smiled an evil smile. With a gesture of absolution, she waved them away.

“I knew they were gonna move. And they were nice about it,” she said, feeling generous. “If they say: ‘Oh dern, I forgot to put money in the meter,’ I might say: ‘Well, you can put some in now.’ We’re not as bad as everybody thinks.

“Besides, if we weren’t out here, you wouldn’t have anyplace to park.”