My work day got off to a perfect start when I pulled into the parking garage. A quickly-printed sign was taped to the card reader. It read something like this:

Please do not drive the wrong way down the garage ramp. The ramp is for driving up and for parking. People have complained and there have been several near accidents.

This particular garage’s floors are laid out in the form of a bisected square. Looking at it from above, the left, top, and bottom sides of the square are flat. The right side is the down ramp, and the middle side (!) is the up ramp.

The traffic flow for going up is as follows:

Up

  • drive up the middle
  • take a sharp left
  • drive along the left side
  • take another sharp left
  • repeat until you reach your floor

(Most of my cow-orkers and I have been banished to the top floor, but that’s a subject for another post.)

At the end of the day, here’s what you do instead:

Down

  • drive along one side of the square
  • drive along another side of the square
  • drive along another side of the square
  • finally drive down the “down” side of the square
  • repeat until dizziness and impatience make you crash into something

If you followed all that, you may have an idea why someone felt it necessary to write the note. See, at the end of the day, leaving the top floor, tired and hungry, the last thing you want to do is drive around and around in circles, only going down one-fourth of the time. So you cheat.

Cheat

You go down the down ramp, make a sharp left, go down the up ramp, make another sharp left, and go down the next down ramp. Et voila: you’ve just dropped three floors in less time than it would take to go down one floor the proper way. It’s late, the garage is over half empty, no one is coming up, and no one parks on the upper floors anyway, except us few poor sods. They keep the rates too high, so the garage is never more than two-thirds full.

The urban geniuses that laid out the garage ignored one crucial thing: people are in a hurry at the end of the day. They’re out of patience. They want to get home and see their families and eat. Yet the proper procedure forces you to take the long way down when you least want to.

It would have been so easy to lay out the flow the other way, so that going up was longer than going down. In a perfect world, they would have installed electronic direction arrows at the corners of each floor, so that up was shortest in the morning and down was shortest in the afternoon. The main thoroughfares to the Charlotte Coliseum (and probably a lot of arenas in larger cities) do just that. Each lane has a programmable traffic light above it, so that lanes can switch directions as conditions dictate. Yes, I know that would cost an arm and a leg. OK, so how about at least using signs that say “turn this way before noon and that way after noon”? Trust our intelligence a little, and most importantly, make it look like you care.

You might say that would invite chaos, and that people would just ignore the signs. Isn’t that what’s happening anyway? I talked to a cow-orker on his way out this evening. He ignored the memo and took the short way down. I can’t say I blame him. When businesses make policy that ignores their customers’ (or employees’, for that matter) needs and wants, rebellion ensues.

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