A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities finds that a taped-up street notice's printed end date makes no measurable difference to when it's actually taken down.
A 214-notice matched-pairs study finds no difference in removal timing between notices that print an expiry date and those that don't
A hand-lettered “closed for renovations” sign is supposed to come down once the renovation ends. A new research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities asks how often that actually happens, and what — if not the date printed on the notice — decides when it finally does.
Nobody has ever had to defend leaving a dated notice up past its date. That’s less a gap in the rules than a question the rules never got around to asking, and we’re glad to have it in front of the School now.
— Dr Marek Solheim, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
Dr Iben Chikere and Dr Marek Solheim tracked 214 taped-up street notices across nine suburbs over five months, pairing each notice that carried a printed end date against a matched undated notice of the same kind, posted within three days of it, then logging which of the pair came down first. The two groups came down on statistically indistinguishable schedules: a median 34 days past the point of relevance for dated notices, 31 for undated.
“We’ve spent a lot of energy teaching the School to notice when a deadline stops being one,” said Dr Chikere. “It turns out a notice on a lamppost is not so different from a plan on a letterhead in that particular respect.”
The result sits alongside the School’s earlier finding that a body corporate’s own precautionary rules rarely get reopened at their stated review date — another instance, this time off any institution’s books entirely, of a printed date doing less work than it looks like it’s doing.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.pyre7k.