THE SEMIOTICS OF PARKING

NO STANDING
EXCEPT
COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC
METERED PARKING
3 HOUR LIMIT
8AM – 7PM
EXCEPT SUNDAY
<----------------->

So read the parking sign on First Avenue in the 30’s. It was five in the afternoon, and I’d been circling the neighborhood for twenty minutes, and immediately beneath the sign was a space, meter and all.

But this was New York, and the sign was an unreliable signifier. Ever notice the complete absence of punctuation and lower-case letters from street signs, so that one must guess where sentences end and begin, based on nothing but hunch and whatever devious clues can be gleaned from line breaks?

So it is not enough to read according to the rules of English grammar. One must also commit what in my circles is known as the Intentional Fallacy, which holds that reading a text in order to discover what its author intended it to mean – as opposed to what it actually means – is improper. For how can we know what was in the mind of, say, Shakespeare, who has been dead for 400 years, or some anonymous toiler in the local DOT office, who may well have received an inferior education, deficient in instruction in the techniques of expository prose, but who is nonetheless charged with the responsibility for wording communications such as this one. Or who may be a dropout from grad school in English, who knows exactly what he’s doing.

Thus my reading of the sign had to depend upon my reading of the signer and his purpose, which might have been to make clear what the parking regulations are or, alternatively, to boost revenues by tricking motorists into parking where they should not through verbal ambiguity and Jesuitical equivocation.

My default guess is always that the intention of the Traffic Department is to thwart, bully, and extort, and I’ve always been right so far. I knew that if I parked in that spot I’d get a ticket that would cost me $110.

And yet . . . by my reading, the sign said it was legal to park there. It makes two separate statements, I believe. The first says that only commercial traffic may stand in the area governed by the sign; all private vehicles must keep moving, at all times on all days. "Standing" means something different from "parking": it's parking plus, moving your car to the curb but not leaving it. The second statement is about parking (that is, locking your car and leaving it at the curb). The implied period after the sentence “No standing except commercial traffic” makes that statement complete and self-contained. The following statement – a paraphrase of which would read, “Metered parking is available to all for up to three hours between 8 AM and 7 PM, except on Sunday, when anyone may park for any duration without paying,” is not dependent on the early statement about who may stand and who may not, either grammatically or logically. It was 5 PM; it was a Monday; therefore, I was entitled to park at the meter if I paid for two hours, after which I need not pay until the next morning at 8 AM.

As I pondered lonely as a cloud, I noticed a cop car idling at a pump at the end of the block. I pulled up next to him, rolled down my window, and said, “Excuse me, officer, is it legal for me to park here?” The exemplar of New York’s Finest to whom I spoke, a burly man with, appropriately, a five o’clock shadow, looked at me as if I were being a wise guy. “Didja read the sign?” he asked? “Yes, I did,” I replied. “Then you know ya can’t park.”

For a moment, I thought of engaging him in earnest discussion. Then I asked myself what happens to people who come off as elitist and condescending to cops, and I nodded briskly, rolled up the window, and drove slowly up the avenue, looking for the nearest garage.