A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement audits two visitor car-park renaming events, finding parking behaviour unchanged and the University's own year-on-year comparison quietly compromised.
Two renaming events and three semesters of boom-gate logs turn up no change in where anyone parks, but one in how the University compares this year to last
Zone C has answered to three different names in three years, and nobody at Facilities had checked whether the difference mattered to a single driver. A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement has.
Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, Lecturer Bram Ntuli, and Lecturer Dagny Okafor followed three of the University’s largest visitor car parks through two full renaming rounds, matching boom-gate records across each change to work out whether a driver’s chosen bay moved along with the new signage. It mostly didn’t. What moved was the paperwork: the hand-built list linking an old zone code to its replacement got harder to trust with every round, to the point where a meaningful share of this year’s zones can no longer be honestly compared with last year’s.
Renaming a car park is a completely legitimate way to be seen fixing something. It just isn’t a way of fixing it.
— Senior Lecturer Renke Sabel, School of Continuous Improvement
“It’s the audit that changed, not the car park,” said Dr Dagny Okafor, a co-author on the paper, “which is a distinction worth keeping around the next time somebody proposes a rename.”
The University is treating the result as a useful, if slightly deflating, gut-check on a signage programme nobody had thought to test before now. The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.cz30jf.