Can you decipher this Sydney parking sign? Aussies are divided

News.com.au

7 days ago

A video of a driver struggling to understand a Sydney parking sign has exposed a huge issue with Aussie roads – with many other nations also unable to decipher its meaning.
Marie Phitidis, who goes by the name Mars, witnessed a woman spend at least 10 minutes trying to understand a large parking sign on Oxford Street, in the city suburb of Paddington, and concluded it was too complicated for busy drivers.
After filming the unknown woman's parking battle, Mars shared the clip online, where Aussies quickly flooded it with their opinions.
'I think parking signs should be able to be understood at a glance, not after several minutes,' Mars, who posts under the handle @phoodietiktok, told news.com.au.
'Especially if you're driving and you don't want to hold up traffic and you need to reverse park. You should be able to glance at the ONE sign and understand it immediately.'
The video, which she cheekily captioned 'she was here for 78 minutes trying to make sense of Sydney's INSANE parking sign,' shows a sign featuring a large list of instructions for drivers.
The rules include the fact that the spot is a Loading Zone between 8am and 10.30am everyday but then changes to 2 hour paid parking from 10.30am until 4pm.
After that, between the hours of 4pm and 7pm it's a bus lane, but only on Monday through to Friday.
From 7pm until 9pm (Monday to Friday) it once again becomes a 2 hour paid parking. On Saturdays and Sundays between 10.30am and 9pm it is also 2 hour paid parking.
While some have argued 'people shouldn't be driving if they can't read that', there are many others who believe the sign is 'too complicated'.
Those firmly in team 'hell no', point out that many drivers would have inevitably copped a fine by the time they'd figured out what the rules were.
'By the time you park there and decipher the sign, you'd probably have a ticket already,' one said.
'Yeah absolutely not, I'm parking somewhere else. All I'm seeing is that you're gonna cop a fine,' reasoned another.
As someone else noted: 'I think I would of drive off, too scary for me.'
'The problem is my brain is doing the thing where it's like I'm going cross eyed & it's all merging together, twisting and turning, kinda unravelling and it feels like I'm trying to read scribble,' noted one very confused Aussie.
But other, clearly more confident drivers, claimed the sign 'really is not that hard at all'.
'This is very easy to read though and I'm not even from Sydney,' argued one.
'Uh its pretty simple. Just start from the top sign and work your way down. Takes about a minute to understand,' mused someone else.
As one bloke teased: ''Move aside' – every Melburnian.'
Mars said she has been 'shocked by the number of people defending the signs', stating it is anything but 'super easy to read', as one of her commenters claimed.
'I was also shocked by the number of commenters who were bothered enough to then type out full explanations of what each and every one of the signs was saying,' she explained.
'I wrote back to a few people clarifying my position which was 'of course I could read and understand the signs, I didn't need someone to explain them to me, my point is purely that it is over complicated and for what reason?'
'People who are driving down busy Oxford Street, with loads of traffic behind them, who are going to stop traffic to park, need to be able to glance quickly and within a few seconds be able to decide if they can park there or not.'
She added that she was not trying to shame the woman who was struggling in any capacity, but highlight an ongoing issue around the complicated wording of the city's road signs.
It wasn't just Aussies who were confused by the road sign, with several international TikTok users trying their luck at reading it.
'I'm a Brit and I worked it out in 30 seconds, not that hard,' one bragged.
'Jeez Louise, that's a brain f**k,' mused another.
As one American declared: 'Y'all, Australia is wild.'
Sydney is known for its complex parking signs with local residents often complaining about the unnecessarily complicated system.
The nightmare situation has been such an issue, the city trialled Smart Signage in the CBD at the end of 2022, an initiative that was introduced as part of the government's $695 million Smart Technology Corridors Program.
The digital signs were created to 'improve kerbside customer information and reduce congestion in key traffic locations', according to Transport for New South Wales (TfNSW) at the time.