Why are all the record holders for parallel parking using a flashy non-parallel parking maneuver to park?
I can get most of the cars I’ve owned into spots as small as they have done, but doing it the actual way normal people parallel park: pull forward, back in, straighten out. If I have less than a foot total to work with then it’ll take some jockeying, but I’ve managed with as little as 4" longer than the car itself in total without even touching any other bumper.
I guess that’s my secret super power!
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The 3 point turn I had to make back in 2000 was right in front of the apartment building I’ve been living in since late 2011 and I’m about to leave.
Apparently the fenders over the front wheels was a common Nash styling trend so they had terrible turning radii and/or the front wheels had a narrower track than the rear wheels.
Yes some of our bicycle advocates were parroting this a while back and it made little sense to me. I look back by using a mirror, or turning my head. It has nothing to do with what I do with my hands. You can tell drivers that they have to look for bike riders but it makes no difference when 99% of those drivers believe that bike riders who run into doors are in the wrong. Our laws say otherwise but few people know that.
So when people are muttering about which hand to use to open your door they could say “drivers are responsible for bikes hit by doors. Thats the law. We know its never enforced but its the law all the same”.
The other problem: a lot of SMIDSY [1] crashes aren’t due to lack of vision, they’re due to lack of attention.
Drivers can often look straight at a biker and still motor into them, because they’re not consciously looking with full attention; they’re using partial attention to scan for threats. Bikes don’t register as a threat, so they’re pre-consciously dismissed as irrelevant background detail.
For a nice demonstration of this, ride for a while on a nondescript motorcycle, then swap to something that resembles whatever the local cops use (around here, anything white with a fairing will do). All of a sudden, the frequency of people “not seeing you” goes way down.
[1] “Sorry mate, I didn’t see you”
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Yes its part of why integrated cycling is safer, because it upsets people and gets their attention.
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First time I went to Paris (OMFG, 23 years ago now…) I was very surprised to see drivers routinely pushing already-parked cars out of their way, bumper-to-bumper, as they squeezed their 2CVs and such into tiny, cobbled parking spaces. I assumed at the time that people parked in neutral, with handbrakes disengaged, to allow this (and minimise the damage done).
Does that still happen? (
Or indeed, did it ever happen - maybe I’m manufacturing false memories???)
ETA: My memory is fine!
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I learned it as “parking by Braille”.
A lot of heavily populated cities have this issue.
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Heavily populated cities, plus people leaving crazy gaps when parking. Add anal-retentive parking cops who write tickets for parking more than 12" away from the curb, and throw in some suburbanites who haven’t had to parallel park since their driver’s test.
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In France, we call it “stationnement à la Parisienne” (Parisian-style parking).
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The point is that it forces people who might not be conscious of bike riders to actually physically look for bikes before they get out.
This. It’s unfortunately easy to do, lose attention to what you’re doing while driving a car. The more conscious we are that non-car drivers are on the road with us, the more likely we’ll be to pay attention, I think. At least I hope so.
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They turn tight enough, trust me. (V70s, anyway, the phase 2 apart, as noted.)
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Works great unless the place you want to be is a place where there is about one house for every fifty acres.
Where there isn’t much traffic nor parking to worry about. Most people don’t want to live that far from other places they want to be.
But it doesn’t. It does turn your body more to the street side of the car, but you would still have to turn your head 90 more degrees to look for a bike. In my commercial van it would do no good at all because there are no side windows in the back. My van does however have good mirrors, which are useless if my body is turned 90 degrees to the right.
I have been told that you need a special license to attach a tow bar to your car in Paris. People definitely park like this.
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Okay… fair enough, I guess.
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