Ahead of the Spam Museum opening this spring and attracting more visitors to Austin, the City Council is taking steps to more clearly mark public parking lots.

The City Council approved a plan Monday to replace several green public parking signs on Main Street with blue signs that will simply say Parking with the letter P in a circle and have an arrow pointing to the lot.

“The blue ones will more accurately depict our downtown parking lots for visitors and residents as to where public parking is available,” Public Works Director Steven Lang said.

Lang brought examples of the current and future parking signs to the City Council. The city will update, revise and install parking lot signs at the entrance to each lot to clearly identify them as public parking. The lots will not be named at this time.

The city is also evaluating the duration of signage and duration of parking in the lots themselves.

The city will also evaluate the parking duration for each lot as it considers adding a three hour parking duration versus a two hour parking duration and if the city should continue to stager parking duration with shorter durations closer to Main Street.

Those durations would increase as people move farther away from main street.

“The durations would increase as you move farther away from Main Street,” Lang said. “We’re trying to encourage long term parking to be farther away from Main Street and shorter term parking, which would rollover more frequently to be closer to Main Street.”

Each sign costs about $30 to make and about $100 to install a new post and for time and materials.