Rushed LA residents thankful to find one-minute parking sign is a typo

The sign had been warning drivers of the wrong restrictions for as long as three years, before it was spotted and changed this week

Already-rushed Los Angeles residents managed a drastic change in parking restrictions this week — finding that a sign that had been warning people for three years that they could only park for one minute on a busy street was a typo.

A Los Angeles Times journalist spotted the sign in an upmarket LA neighbourhood, and took a photo that was later posted on social website Reddit. Users of that site then found the site of the sign and contacted authorities to ask to have it changed.

It will now be replaced with one bearing the correct one-hour time limit. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation said that a new sign could take up to two weeks to make, but the sign had been replaced within hours.

The sign can still be seen in Google Street View, in an image from August 2012, in Brentwood, an affluent neighbourhood in the Westside of Los Angeles. The sign may have been in the spot since 2011, according to reports.