Not sure what you mean by "a little better" (concerning what we as the people who received tickets could have done) when there are police cars blocking entry to the park where people COULD park and not be inside the race route but no one directing traffic to where you can park. I have been stopped many times by an officer who told me if I stayed parked where I was I would be ticketed. So this "NOPD does not tell people where not to park" business is total BS and a total setup. What they fail to understand is that they are there to SERVE and PROTECT people. They failed to provide any service at all!
And I am not sure where you saw these signs but there were NO SIGNS indicating not to park in the neutral zone in any line of sight for me and the other hundreds of people who got tickets when I got there at 6:30am.
How are people from out of town supposed to know anything about a parking fiasco that happened last year or at the last event? It doesn't matter if they run an article in the local paper, that may help about 5% of the race entrants.
I really think the organizers should have done more to prevent what happened. They could have worked out something to provide $2 parking in the "neutral zones" and donated that to the city. They could have put something on the front page of the CCC website about where you can and cannot park. They could have put notes in the goodie bag about the parking situation. But they didn't do anything, so I hope they're prepared to throw out another couple of hundreds of tickets.