If you can’t perform basic maneuvers like parallel parking it means you have no idea where your vehicle stands on the road and you should not be allowed to drive.
If I can learn to parallel park a semi with a 53’ trailer I’m pretty sure you can learn how to park your Mazda.
I have a new car now and it has one of the reverse cameras, and somehow that makes me worse at parallel parking.
Focusing on the reverse camera probably does make you worse at reverse parking because it puts your attention on a small part of the overall situation. They’re a nice thing to have as an additional viewpoint in tighter spaces but it’s better to use your side mirrors primarily while also checking regularly on the front of the car and the reverse camera.
Jokes on you, I actually have a VW. Checkmate atheist
I live in a car-centric city with close-to-zero public transportation. Not having adequate parking options is immediately a deterrent for me to go to a place, and I’d rather not go unless it’s a very important event that I can’t avoid.
That mindset incentives places to build bigger parking spaces, making the city more car-centric.
Ride a bike
I’m sorry, but biking 15 miles (home to downtown) in 95F/35C+ temps with little to no bike lanes in my city is just not safe.
To add to it, drivers are often actively hostile to bikers in these places for some reason. I live near a university so it’s a little bit better, but it still kinda sucks.
That’s sucks I’m sorry
Phoenix? Sounds like Phoenix. Actual urban hellscape.
Sounds like any American city really.
Moped
If you are bad at driving have you considered taking the bus?
Mostly I do but occasionally I have to drive, and my new car terrifies me. It’s so big and different and I don’t drive it enough to know what the buttons all do.
I‘m genuinely currious: why do you drive / own a car thats terrifying you?
I so seldom drive it, my ex spouse mostly does so he picked it out. I am fine with that, but still adapting.
one more parking lot bro
Parallel parking is just 180degree handbrake turn parking but with fewer style points and more steps.
Genuinely though, it’s car specific but my driving instructor had a bit of tape on the rear windscreen, and once the last part of the car you were next to passed that bit of tape, you started your turn in. It was a delightfully simple system that took 50% of the work out of parallel parking.
Somehow I got my license 34 years ago and did the parallel parking, and I’ve avoided it ever since.
It’s something of a necessity in the UK. A lot of high streets in town centres have on-street parking which are regulated just by the sizes of the vehicles currently there - there rarely any defined parking spaces on the roadside. Parallel parking is an essential skill to be able to park on the roadside in most major towns.
That, or there’s outdoor car parks or multi-storey car parks at shopping centres or large event venues for those who prefer to find a marked-out space to drive into.
That said, it’s nothing that can’t be practised with two cones and a plank of wood in a clearing somewhere, if you’re so inclined.
I got mine a little over 18 years ago. Parallel parking wasn’t part of my test but it was for my younger siblings. Different states.
As someone who grew up in the countryside I can’t stand driving in a city at all.
This tbh: people who hate driving are usually people who live in a city. It is objectively the worst way to get around a city, but in more rural areas it can be a lot of fun to drive around, depending on how windy the roads are or how fast your car is and how many cops are around 😅
As someone who went through the experience of owning a pretty nice fast car, I’d say having a slower car that you drive fast is much more fun, in my Kia Stinger I could go 160km/h and feel nothing but dread about what if I hit someone
I agree driving a slow car fast is was more fun than driving a fast car slow!
I went through 3 Subaru WRXs before I switched to the Miata. The only one of them I miss now is the rally built one I had because rally driving is objectively the most fun type of driving.
But throwing my Miata around a corner harder than a McLaren in autocross is pretty damn close too haha
Yeah true, I was more meaning if you live somewhere that only has straight roads, a quick car(not necessarily fast: I said fast but I meant quick 😅) can be fun in that case.
On a windy road it’s most important that the car is light weight than anything else for it to be fun.
So sub-compacts from the 90s are generally best in that regard.
You don’t experience speed, but acceleration. That’s why it way more fun to take bends fast but straight lines feels like nothing.
Once you stop driving cities should be great because so much stuff is in walking distance or has transit to get you close
This, I just got back from a night of cryptid huntin’.
Skill issue
I always have parking considerations when suggesting places to go. I hate not getting parking instructions. I am perfectly content to park on the street as long as I can find it without stress.
If your backup cam has the little lines that curve when you turn the steering wheel, that will help. Otherwise, practice. Can maybe even get in and out of the vehicle a couple of times to get a good sense of space. Worst case you mess up and have to readjust a couple times.
I unironically love parking lots & garages, and feel like a city without parking is a prison.
If I had my druthers, existing bike lanes would be turned into medians, side of road parking would become bike lanes, and enough real estate converted to parking garages to meet peak demand.
Sharing a bus or train with a lot of other people every day isn’t appealing because of the way a lot of other people are.
That would just be several hundred square miles of parking lots with the occasional Denny’s. There are plenty of one-horse towns like that, please don’t fuck up our cities because you are obsessed with your car. We have to actually live here.
Idk, parallel parking is tricky without a camera or parking sensors, but having at least one of these make it super easy.
Skill issue tbh
I drive a pickup truck made before any of that crap was widely available. The hard part about parallel parking is finding a space long enough. Most parallel parking situations seem to be laid out with enough room for vehicles to exist in a line without any thought as to how they’d arrive in that situation.
I parallel parked today. Went better than I expected.
I’ve always wondered if a small car like a Smart Car could just perpendicular park instead and call it a day. Parking cops are fucking morons so it would be hard to explain coloring inside the lines to them.
I was in Rome recently and saw smart cars and other types of micro-car doing this everywhere. Which makes complete sense given how busy yet small Rome is.
Was in Vietnam recently. About 80% of their traffic is mopeds, and they park those things anywhere there is space, including sometimes in the lobby of the building they’re going to (most buildings are open-air anyway).
Good luck in any Mediterranean hill town, mate!
Bus
