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.
