The fact that they put the kid in a particular physical space to block a particular car that had been waiting longer was aggressive. There is no formal rule, but the typical cultural behavior/convention is that the first person in the queue gets the spot, as with other queues. They had to have been aware of the fact that they were aggressively transgressing a social boundary or they wouldn’t have put the kid in front of the car to block them in the first place.
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so it’s … space camping? Sorry I’ve been replacing sleep with playing EVE Online for three weeks straight now
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It’s more like dropping a passenger off to go into the post office while you sit blocking a lane of traffic waiting for that person to come out. In both cases, you are blocking a lane of traffic while selfishly waiting for something instead of driving a little further and finding a spot to park. Hmm. Seems exactly the same. And both are douchey.
That is not the same either.
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You’re making a very solipsist argument. Just because you don’t find those “edge cases” to be true frequently doesn’t mean they aren’t true for other people. Do you survey everyone around you in a parking lot to ask their experience with parking strategy and what circumstances in their life led them to adopt such a strategy? Of course not. You don’t know what other people experience so you can’t dismiss perfectly plausible scenarios as “almost never true.”
The exact scenario here is irrelevant. I think you’ve been thinking that some of us are defending the guy who posted the video. I’m only arguing that the mere fact of waiting for someone to leave a spot who appears to be packing up and getting ready to go is not douchey. The guy who posted the video clearly is douchey because he was throwing a fit when it wasn’t worth it and he should have just moved on when he realized they weren’t going to relent.
The original position I took was in response to this statement: [quote=“Sir_Dook, post:37, topic:78209”]
the bad guy is anyone who camps out waiting for a parking space.
[/quote]
Sir_Dook didn’t reference this specific scenario but rather made a generalized statement on parking strategy.
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I agree with Sir_Dook. And I realize it’s a little off topic but I have held this view for a long time: space campers have always driven me crazy. So I’m venting a bit. Thank you for indulging me 
I should not have acknowledged there are edge cases when it’s justified. it’s never justified. Even in the nonexistent hypothetical universe where there is only one parking lot in the world and there is only 1 spot open in the lot and 10 people circling, your decision to block the lot for the other nine so that only you get the spot is the definition of selfish. You stop everyone else from getting out of the lot and going home just so you and only you can get the spot. Because for some reason you are more deserving than everyone and also you are entitled to inconvenience everyone else in order to get your well-deserved spot.
Keep driving and whoever is there at the moment the spot becomes empty gets the spot.
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I was going to skip watching the video but now I may have to go back and look if it is local.
From the comments in this case the driver is aware of the pedestrian blocking the spot - given the number of drivers that seem to be oblivious to their surroundings I would advise against using family members you wish to keep as parking spot markers.
This morning I saw a high school student crossing though traffic a corner and just stop in the middle of the street. Given that she was obscured by the cars in the inner lane from the drivers in the outer lane it could have ended badly. Especially since two years ago i was there helping a fallen cyclist before the ambulance tuned up because a car in the outer lane cut the corner and forced the cyclist to swerve and fall off. Using people as lane markers does not work.
edit: I did not know they had so many locations these days.
It’s all just a variation of “Holding someones place in line”.
Though it often feels a little douchey to be on the receiving end of it, in my neck of the woods it’s acceptable for a mother to drop her kid as a placeholder in a queue (eg, for theatre tickets/entry).
One flavour that irks me a little (or would do if I obsessed over it for more than two seconds) is when you are standing in line at a cafeteria, there’s limited seating, and a family group that arrives behind you sends out a vanguard to camp on the last free table. Doh!
But it’s 100% something I would do myself if I had the opportunity - so I accept is as a totally fair move!
And though extremely rare, if someone negotiates directly with folk at a seated table as they are leaving, it’s up to the departing residents to make the choice to pass the table on to them, bypassing any other queue conventions.
Camping a parking space is entirely the same thing to me. Whether you are inside a tin can or not, placing a person in the space, wins.
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How do we know the kid on the bike was related to the woman and the driver of the car?
You can’t really understand what the woman says to the dashcam driver. Maybe she and the kid are parking lot attendants whose job is to block off parking spots for folks who pay them.
If they were all related, where did the kid get the bike? I don’t know too many families who drive around town with a tween/teen’s bike in the trunk, just waiting for those special opportunities when the kid can jump out, get on the bike, and become a human traffic cone.
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Or of Polish ancestry. I still remember my grandmother and her babushkas. 
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It is no more aggressive than the other driver’s feelings of entitlement to that space.
The lady, through proxy, took it first.
Your situation has all of the cars blocked and trying to get home, but there are no spaces available???
Nope, first come first served. What you are describing just doesn’t happen anywhere I have been.
Well, sure, I could - but that would just encourage him to honk at the next ‘slowpoke’, too.
So I’m going with negative behavioral feedback. Not every human is trainable, but I feel I should at least give them a chance. (-:
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I hadn’t said anything about the other driver since it’s not really relevant. They were mostly passive in the situation. There was a little assertion over a social boundary being tromped on by the driver of the car and the person in the spot over their perceived rights at being there before the other driver, but they were mostly passive, and they backed off in the face of a confrontation and didn’t turn it more aggressive. They were in a confrontation with a very aggressive family, saw a multitude of social boundaries being transgressed (a line not being respected, parking norms being thrown out the window, the transgressive use of the proxy, apparently a parent selfishly putting their child in potential harm’s way over something as unimportant as a parking spot, and apparently sending their child to act as an aggressor with the bike, et al.), so they responded passive-aggressively by complaining about it on the internet which is a kind of aggression.
Still the people who jumped to the exiting car to negotiate taking a spot someone else was waiting for (which is a transgression of social boundaries around queues) then physically blocking the guy from the spot with the bike appear far, far more aggressive than the guy filming.
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The blocked car is following typical parking space etiquette, how is that entitlement?
The blocking car is throwing away etiquette and making their own rules. How is that not entitlement?
Actually, now that I looked at the video again, you are dead wrong using your own logic. The “blocked” car arrives first, then the “blocker” approaches from another lane and asks for the spot. The blocker has no right to that space at all.
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On behavioural feedback - whose behaviour in the video do we want to encourage, and whose to condone?
- The family that made a human connection with resident and asked for their space (presumably with compelling reasons)?
- Or the person who got pissy about that and turned it into a confrontation instead of just shrugging and moving on to the next spot.
Note: This question may be orthogonal to “Who was in the right?”
I know ‘squatting’ is used for occupying buildings, but I dunno. Space Camping works for parking spots/line placement. On the other hand I generally am less bummed out about friends spotting friends’s spot in line, especially if it’s reasonable (like you’re holding for aa plus one, not plus fifty, and or you’re being polite.
This person’s rudeness contributes greatly to my lack of sympathy.
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You’re describing musical chairs. That’s not a logical system for parking spot distribution unless you just worship randomness and chance. Why should a person who has circled the lot for a long time have to keep driving when a spot appears likely to open up soon? It seems like a severe edge case for someone to just up and go home if they can’t find a parking spot and it seems stupid to give up on a spot that might open soon. A lot of people go places that they feel they need to go to, so going home without even parking is a non-starter for them. Some of them might objectively have more than just a selfish reason for needing to get to the store soon, even if you can’t imagine that scenario. You must live in a nice fantasy world (or a really small town) where time and fuel are near infinite for just about anyone you see.
I would agree that camping in a lane when there is no one who appears to be leaving any time soon at their cars, but if there appears to be a chance that someone will leave soon, camping is a perfectly logical and understandable thing to do.
If the lane is too thin for others pass while a person waits, then you need to complain to the community planners, parking lot owners, and their contractors. It’s not the fault of the person who needs to park that the lane is too thin so as to cause them to block people behind them.
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That’s ridiculous. When you are waiting with your blinker on others just drive around you. that is what regular people do.
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Why did the human connection stop at the recording guy, and instead turn into a physical aggression?
If the blocker had explained what her problem was to the recorder instead of physically blocking him with a child, maybe compassion would have won out.
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