I’m not up on the names of the various biases. But I feel like there’s one where you take how things are for you, and apply it to everyone else as though yours was the metric for “normal”.
Either way, yes. Parking can get pretty bad where I live. WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE are driving, and they all gotta stop somewhere, and a lot of that time it’s not at their own homes.
The lot I saw that car in typically fills up; there’s no “back of the lot” parking because it has a Super Target and other stores at one end, and Gamestop and other shops at the other end.
That said, parking availability is not really the point, in my opinion.
Parking between the lines so nobody will ding your car is selfish behavior. Period. It’s saying, “What I have is important, so to keep you careless fuckers away I’m going to take twice as much space as has been allotted to me. Inconvenient for you? Tough shit.”
What can I say? I really took the whole, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” stuff to heart when I was young. Equality and fairness matter to me to a very high degree.
In my 20’s I lived in an older neighborhood that was mostly only street parking. If everyone was home on my block we all just barely fit. Everyone was very considerate about each other and we all worked together to make sure everyone could park.
Then an old windowless van showed up. The owner of the van would leave it parked in a spot in front of someone else home up until the day before the city was going to tow it. They would move it across the street and then leave it there for another 30 days. Months went by. Everyone left notes asking the person to stop doing this. I followed him one day after he did this. He lived 3 or 4 blocks away. His front yard was full of broken down cars. His driveway had several broken down cars. His whole block was filled with cars that looked the same but who knows how many where his.
So we and who knows how many other streets nearby were for his overflow. After nearly a year of this, my youthful self went out the night before the tow truck came and flattened all 4 tires plus the spare. Never saw the guy or his van again.
Part of me is/was proud of standing up to the guy (passive aggressively when he wasn’t around). Part of me feels guilty about damaging someone else’s property (even when they are being a jerk). It is really not in my nature but I reached my breaking point.
I get that. But it’s not like you turned into a tire slashing hooligan, out roaming the streets looking for thrills at the expense of anyone in your path. FWIW if I were on the jury, I wouldn’t convict you.
Heh. There was (still is? I dunno anymore) a restaurant right near the house I grew up in. Our neighbor was known to slash the tires of customers using the street as overflow parking. You at least have a solid case for it.
Toward the end of high school a close friend of mine became a reborn christian. This translated into him going to the local porn shop a bit before they closed (2am?) and slashing the tires of the cars parked there. His justification was that guys would have to call their wives and explain why they were where they were at that hour. I asked what about single guys that were not “cheating” on anyone by being there? He shrugged and said they shouldn’t be there either.
This gets at some of my guilt. I felt justified in my vandalism. My ex-friend felt justified in his. Maga hats feel justified in spray painting racist graffiti on non-christian churches. Everyone is so sure they are justified in actions that in some way impact another person negatively. It can be easy to get stuck in a bubble which leads to justifying the unjustifiable.
Proper etiquette is to just park in the far reaches of the lot, so that no one wants to park next to you. I used to do that most of the time to avoid dings. However, some dingbats still park next to you, and ding your doors, so…
