For The Love Of All That Is Holy, Stop Backing Into Parking Spaces:
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.
But, ah, my foes! And, ah, my friends! The timing of it is not what’s important. It’s a safety issue and a vision issue.
When you’re backing up, you are in an uncomfortable position with reduced vision just because you’re craned all the way around to see where you’re going–or you’re just using the context-free backup camera, in which case you’re already behaving unsafely enough that my advice won’t help you. So you have two choices as when to back up:
- When you’re pulling into the parking space. Which means the things in your peripheral vision will be stationary parked cars. Not many people on foot are going to dart between your car backing into a spot, as the space between the rear of your car and the other cars diminishes.
- When you’re backing into traffic from either direction and with pedestrians appearing on either side of your car and on either side of the traffic lane. Not to mention other cars backing out into the traffic lane that might be turning into the traffic lane in your blind spots.
Note when leaving driving forward, your position will generally be forward of center, which means you will not only have easier and better visibility into the traffic lane because you’re facing forward, but you’ll also have an earlier increasing field of view because you will be abreast of the edges of the other cars sooner than when you back out. When you’re backing out, you’re not only doing this:
But more of your vehicle is exposed in the traffic lane before you get that increased visibility of clearing the parked cars.
Yeah, no. Pulling directly through an unclaimed parking spot so you can pull straight out is the best (mostly when the parking lines are parallel–when they’re at an angle, it’s less good as you have to cross more of the traffic lane to make sure you don’t clip the car next to you), but after that, backing into a spot is best, followed by parallel parking, and only then, as a last resort, backing into traffic.
I can’t believe I even have to point this out. But it’s a blog, and that’s what we do on blogs. Go on at length in spurious slap-fights.
