- You can park here for free for two hours
- You can park here for free for as long as you want
- You must pay to park here and can park for up an hour
- You must pay to park here and can park for up to two hours
- You must pay to park here and can park as long as you want to pay for
- You cannot park here
- you cannot park here on such and such time for street cleaning.
- you cannot park here on such and such time for rush hour
- you cannot park here on such and such time for snow removal.
Plus there are license plates that are sometimes given permission to illegally park based on the reasons not to park.
- (unsigned, city-wide bylaw) you cannot park anywhere during such hours without a permit unless otherwise indicated
- (unsigned, city-wide bylaw) you cannot park anywhere for more than 3 hours unless otherwise indicated
- you cannot park between the signs (taxi stand/pickup)
- no stopping anytime
- you can not park here on school days
- handicapped parking only
- commercial loading only
- 3 minute passenger loading!
- Taxi-only parking
- Ambulance waiting spot
All of these spots are also "idling police car" spots.
When a sign serves to delineate areas with certain rules using arrows (e.g. no parking past this sign).
- Parking for loading/unloading only
The only example for "irregular" no parking times I've seen in Germany are special exceptions for markets (typically Wednesday and Sunday, but the sign won't tell you if the market is cancelled on a particular day for a particular reason and you won't get towed or fined if you then park there when the market isn't happening) or special occasions (e.g. a circus) where they put up a temporary sign a week in advance.
I guess Germans really are more efficient (while simultaneously being more in love with having rules for every eventuality).
However: it's hard to argue that the three cases that I listed are too many rules, yet it's easy to see that they can cause too many signs using the OP's design. Such a simplification made the point much clearer, but I should have made that explicit.
- Free parking (5 hours remaining) - No Parking (4.5 hours remaining)
Of course, that has its own problems, (Power, vandalism, bugs ...) but it would help drivers a LOT. As the article said, no one cares about WHY they can't park, usually. It's only "can I park here right now?" that matters in most cases.
"Free parking (1h 45m remaining)" doesn't help if you want to park for 2 hours and don't know if the next time period is "no parking" or "max 1 hour parking".
The third most important thing is likely knowing about some time in the future, like "will my visiting friend be able to park here on Saturday evening?"