Parking Peeves

Sometimes parking is difficult. Some people are lousy parallel parkers for example. It takes them twenty tries to get into a huge spot, and by the time they're done I can almost forgive them taking up two spots with their little Neon or Corolla. Other times parking is badly designed or plotted out, either making it difficult to maneuver or hard to tell where it's ok to park. For some reason, the parking spots in front of my building are only marked about a foot and a half back from the curb. I can't think why they decided to do this, I'm guessing someone thought it was less ugly, but it's pretty idiotic. For most of the year it's ok, although I've seen at least one car that regularly manages to "not notice" where the lines are and parks any which where. In the winter however, after the first lasting snow, parking becomes a several month long nightmare. The little yellow lines appear to be exactly as long as the lingering snow, and it's impossible to tell where to park.

But that's kind of excusable, what amazes me are the people who park badly intentionally. I'll never understand what it is that makes someone think it's ok to double park. I realize that not everyone is a wonderful parker, and sometimes, even if you're just brilliant at parking (and what a skill that would be to brag about) it's just not possible to pull in at a good angle. But have we heard of backing out and straightening out people? Seriously?To my mind it is simply impossible that the above driver failed to notice that he/she was parked that horribly. They just didn't care. Fortunately another car was able to squeeze into the half space next to it, but forcing someone to do that is incredibly inconsiderate. I think in this case this was just laziness but there are at least two types of intentional double parking. The first is vehicles which are simply huge, and unless they're absolutely perfectly parked (and sometimes not even then) they're going to spill over into at least one extra space. Although I don't think much of gigantic cars, at least I can understand that in this case it's not necessarily willful thoughtlessness as it is a natural consequence. Of course if they'd get a car that didn't take up that much space, chances are they could get more than 6 miles/gallon too, so maybe there's more than one kind of indifference here.

The second kind of double parking is the jerks who really really really like their car, and think that, because their car is expensive/pretty/new they are somehow entitled to two spaces. I posted this picture a while ago, where we saw a silver car that believed this.

We saw this two weeks in a row, but the second week someone had decided to shimmy their way into the left hand half-space, and so Matt decided to park in the right hand half-space. Fantastic. Here's hoping the jackass learned something.