Blue & white
Handicapped
Parking signs and stencils are one of urban life’s most
familiar icons… and then there are those that have been
creatively hacked.
There’s a fine line between amusement and mean-spiritedness but
when it comes to visual imagery, outrage is often in the eye of
the beholder. With that in mind, this edgy, spiky,
flame-enhanced “Parking Space Designator” (is that what the
kids are calling them these days?) follows the road blazed by
TV’s Dr House and his boss flame-graphic walking cane. You’ll
find the
stencil on steroids above outside a Retail Boutique
Incubator, tentatively attributed to Sean McDougal of Disfunctional Design
Store.
Interlocked & Loaded
Those interlocking driveway paving stones can be fit together
in any number of patterns, including a reasonable, recognizable
facsimile of the accessible parking graphic. Flickr user zwei
zwei (zwei1189)
captured this image on February 5th of 2015.
Brazil Not
A parking spot reserved for the “Sorcerer”
truck, we assume? Not quite – this clever conjunction of a
designated handicapped parking space and some
awesome eye-fooling 3D graphic art comes from Brazil, where
there’s an ongoing problem of able-bodied people parking in
handicapped spaces “just for a minute”. Yeah, riiight.
The explanatory text on the wall roughly translates from
Portuguese to read “When you stop in place for disabled,
you make his life more difficult”. It’s a theme we’ll
revisit further on in this post.
Hold My Beer And Park This
Flickr user
Mike Klassen snapped this mildly yet distinctively modified
accessible parking sign behind a BC Liquor store in late
September of 2008. As for that “fine line” we mentioned
previously, well, this edges close to it but we’ll leave the
last word to Nathan Ridge, one of the commenters at Klassen’s
photo page: “I’ve heard of discrimination against disabled
persons, but this is the first time I’ve heard of it the other
way around! I love it, especially since I’m in a wheelchair
myself!”
Triple Chair Lift
When Mexico sends us their handicapped parking place stencils,
they’re not… actually sometimes they ARE sending us their best.
Take the “EXCLUSIVO” stencil above, snapped by Flickr user Mary
Doyle (buffoonmeatmary)
on August 5th of 2007. We can’t say whether this awesome
graphic shows a disabled person getting into or out of their
wheelchair but either way, the image demands a Six Million
Dollar Man bionic sound effect to accompany it.
Elderly Man Driver
Elderly man driver, that elderly man driver, he don’t say
nothing but he must know something, he just keeps rolling
along… at 10mph under the speed limit until he (or she)
parks, right on top of this designated Elderly-only parking
space. Who knew this even existed? One might state just being a
senior citizen isn’t actually a “disability” in the strict
sense, though don’t try convincing any grouchy cane-wielding
oldster of that. Flickr user Wee
Viraporn snapped what appears to be a standardized stencil
on January 3rd of 2010.
