The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Stop Backing Into Parking Spaces
We’re not posting excerpts of this article because we agree with journalist Mark Hemingway — some of us proudly confess to backing into parking spaces and we ain’t stopping — but because his 1,400-word screed about parking is quite hilarious and we could all use some levity sometimes.
I’ve noticed a dramatic change in driver behavior, and one that has made running errands rather trying. I don’t want to overstate the problem, but after years of close study, I have arrived at the conclusion that people who back into parking spaces are history’s greatest monsters.
It would not be unreasonable to assume a couple of thousand cars are coming and going from my neighborhood strip mall on a given day. Given that much traffic, there’s a basic formula for efficiency here: The time it takes to get your car into a space added to the time it takes to pull out of the space.
Now a great many drivers seem to be under the impression that, because being able to pull out of parking space when you’re already facing forward is a little quicker than backing straight out of a space, this somehow makes up for any extra time it took to back into the space. Please go to your local busy parking lot with a stopwatch. I assure you, it does not.
Turning while backing into a space is a perilous process, exacerbated by the relative narrowness of the channels between rows in a given parking lot. That’s because there’s no room for error; one misjudged angle while you’re looking over your shoulder results in a small crunch that could cost you a few thousand dollars, to say nothing of the insurance hassle. Even if you think you’re being relatively quick in backing up, there are powerful incentives to make sure you’re extra careful, i.e. slow, when backing into a parking space.
Now contrast this with the traditional way of pulling into a parking space. Due to the fact that about 99 percent of the turns we make are when we are driving forward, our spatial awareness looking ahead is of course far superior. As for backing out of a space, well, when you start with the car parked already inside the space, you don’t really have to judge any complicated angles. You back straight out, confident there’s already space on either side of the car. You only start to turn when you’re mostly out of the space and the turning radius in relation to the cars on either side of you is wide.
The fact that nosing into spaces and backing out was the norm in parking for basically a century tells you all you need to know. The only reason why large numbers of drivers recently got it into their heads they could back into spaces with regularity is not that they all suddenly became better drivers. It’s that they started installing back-up cameras in every car in the last decade.
Hemingway proceeds to explain “what back-up cameras are for,” based largely on his experience with an “aftermarket back-up cam in my ‘06 Mercury Grand Marquis.” He grants that there are exceptions, like the guy in an F-250 he saw once who probably “had spent years delivering payloads on job sites where the terrain was tricky.”
He humorously mocks the lack of this ability in most people, as well as the hypocritical aggravation while you sit waiting for another driver to back into a spot and then do likewise yourself to the next guy. And he’s not done, moving on to opine about access to trunks and back hatches and the crime of “backing into angled parking spaces,” which “should be a felony.” He eventually concludes regarding the immensity of the problem:
With thousands of cars coming and going from a single lot, there’s almost no delay or hold-up for other cars that doesn’t have much wider ramifications, triggering chain reactions that screw up the traffic in the entire lot. In fact, the way civil engineers these days try, and usually fail, to understand complex traffic patterns is by applying chaos theory. So the same way that a fantastical chain of events starting with a butterfly flapping its wings in the Congo leads to the stock market falling 500 points half a world away, every extra 30 seconds wasted in a parking lot is compounding existing problems and making overall traffic worse in ways we can scarcely imagine.
And yet, the people backing into spaces are so selfish they haven’t even tried to imagine the levels upon levels of “just because you could doesn’t mean you should” that we decent citizens are dealing with every day on the mean streets of our local strip mall. If you’re still backing into spaces, just cut it out and pull straight into the space the way basic geometry demands.