Here is something I have wondered about parking signs:
Sometimes the restriction is from 12:00-6:00.
Other places it is from 12:01 to 6:01.
(These are just examples and they’re not from the same street.)
What is the advantage of adding one minute in listing the time?
Avoids the ambiguity over whether 12pm means noon or midnight.
That’s possible, but the times were just an example that I made up. I don’t think that this is just a midnight/ noon issue.
That example doesn’t do that.
12:00 to 18:00 would.
My rule of thumb on things like this is that oddities like 12:01 are the result of the municipality (or whoever owns the sign) losing a fight in court due to a thin semantic gap in how the sign is interpreted. Sometimes the legislation/regulations get tightened up eventually to remove the ambiguity, but change of the sign allows continued reaping of fines. Challenging such laws and regulations seems to be something of a universal passtime.
I think more people would be confused by 24h time since it’s rarely used and virtually never seen ‘in the public’.
I agree, it’s just to avoid confusion over the am/pm thing. If you see a sign that says 12:00am-6:00am, while the second part should give it away, making it 12:01 may help some people since putting it past midnight makes it morning, thus AM. A lot of of people aren’t sure if which 12:00 is AM and which is PM, some of those people can answer correctly if you were to ask them about, say 12:30 since, at that point, we’re well past noon/midnight.
Personally, I’ve never seen a parking restriction that says 12:01 on it (and I’m sort of wondering why it would end at 6:01 instead of 6:00), though I can find some on Google. I think I’ve seen some that say “midnight - xx:xx” but around here most parking night time parking restrictions start at 2am.
Another thought, making it 12:01, in case there’s any legal issue surrounding it, makes it firmly into the next day. For example, if the sign said “No parking Sat Or Sunday 12:00pm - 6:00am” and someone gets a ticket one minute into Saturday night with the timestamp of 12:00, the city doesn’t have to worry about them coming in and arguing (correctly or incorrectly) that 12:00pm is still Friday so 12:00pm-6:00am Sat-Sun would only apply to Sunday but not Saturday. Like I said, rightly or wrongly, just saves the city a headache and waste of resources for when someone with too much time on their hands wants to argue about it in court.
Come to think of it, it wouldn’t surprise me if some jurisdictions ask their officers/parking checkers to wait until at least a few minutes into the ‘no parking’ time before writing the ticket (even if it’s not a midnight/day thing) just so people don’t argue technicalities.
Someone in Wisconsin once challenged a speeding ticket by claiming either the signs or the font on the signs was too small (by something like an inch). He won since the sign was a few inches shorter than it was supposed to be (and I think he was going close to double the limit), the ticket was overturned and the state (city? county?) had to replace a ton of signs.
I’ve always been curious as to whether or not he knew beforehand that the sign wasn’t up to the correct standards of if he just got lucky.
We all need people like that. If there weren’t people with time and resources to challenge them, the local authorities would happily use any old sign that they wanted. These things are standardised to remove any doubt so if they are the wrong shape, the wrong colour or the wrong height, they are invalid.
I would assume that the actual parking statute probably says something like “parking here is only legal from x-6:00”, which means strictly speaking, it becomes illegal at 6:01.
Well no - it’s illegal at any time later than 6:00, which includes 6:00 plus one picosecond.