Most malls and plazas have an adjacent sidewalk and a two-lane road where you are not supposed to park. You can understand someone occasionally stopping there to pick up a disabled shopper or load or unload larger amounts especially if there isn’t a loading area.
Is it my imagination, or since Covid are way more drivers parking out in this road for longer periods of time and no good discernible reason? At one plaza, there must have been ten cars in this road, making the road an annoying one lane affair for everyone else.
Not much security at a plaza, and not something I would personally report unless it affected me much more. But it seems to me to be becoming much worse - waiting for ages to pick up someone able-bodied and adult and able to cross a street in good weather.
I recognize what you’re talking about, but at my shopping areas it is still as rare as it’s always been. I see it, but not often. And not increasing as far as I can tell. Of course, my shopping area is a long ways from yours. Could be a regional thing.
There’s a conventional wisdom notion afloat that Covid isolation, plus human interaction being ever more digital instead of interpersonal made us all introverted morons. And it shows up in traffic. Main Character Syndrome, etc.
Drivers must yield the right of way to pedestrians in crosswalks vs “I’ll just slip around with inches to spare.”
Signal all turns and lane chances, ideally for one second for each 10 mph speed vs “looks clear. Here I go.”
Obey the posted speed limit, or less so as to maintain a safe following distance vs “go as fast as I can until I’m right up on somebody’s ass unless they’re a cop.”
Nothing new. That’s how it’s been for as long as I’ve been driving, with no noticeable increase.
As to cars along the sidewalk at malls, are these cars parked (as in no driver), or are they standing (driver in car awaiting [whatever])?
I believe that there’s a lot more people traveling by rideshare than e.g. 10 years before. So lots more people are being picked up and dropped off everywhere. Which leads to cars standing near entrances.
Separately compared to 10 years ago a lot more people are using Uber Eats or the equivalent where what looks like an ordinary passenger car is in fact a commercial delivery vehicle. At least in terms of the attitude of the driver / courier.
You might not blink at one UPS van parked in a no parking zone near a mall entrance. But the 5 cars parked behind the van are also doing package pickup and delivery. They just don’t look like that’s what’s going on.
Finally, the current politics have taught a lot of selfish people that there’s no real sanction against selfishness. Once you can see the disapproving glares of fellow citizens as a mark of your superior status and their inferior status rather than as a mark of your shame, it becomes real easy to justify to yourself parking in no parking zones, parking in handicapped spaces when you’re not, and simply behaving as if your “fair share” of public goods and spaces is “As much as you can possibly steal or carry”. Winners get the big share; loozers get the scraps. I’m not a loozer, so my selfishness proves I’m a winner.
It’s an uncivilized cretinous way to think, but it is the tenor of the times.
I haven’t noticed this in particular. At the local mall where I most often shop for groceries, there may be one or two cars parked near the supermarket, but the driver is generally in it, engine running, obviously waiting for whatever. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone actually “parked” there. It’s considered a fire route and would be a tow-away zone. And the roadway is wide enough that they’re not actually in the way of two-lane traffic. Idiot drivers really bother me but this, not so much.
I actually think it’s a combination of the two. The pandemic and all the uncertainty, fear, and anxiety made many people much more self-centered as a sort of self-care reaction, and for them and others, the current climate means that there’s less perceived social opprobrium about being self-centered like that.
So you get people who are just more self-centered than they used to be, and as a result, many drive like they’re entitled to do what they want and screw the other guy, because they’re thinking only of themselves and their own plans.
Park in the fire lane: it’s okay if you leave your hazards flashing
Double park, park athwart somebody’s driveway, whatever.
Those of you with wheelchairs: weren’t those first few weeks were a revelation on how handicapped parking is violated?
The US was never much of a culture of shame (external negative pressure), but whatever forces exerted by internal guilt have eroded as well. “I don’t care what others think of me,” can be spun as a positive. “I don’t care what I think of myself - I don’t even really think about myself at all, actually,” may be the new normal
I wouldn’t say this really bothers me; it is a slight nuisance to have to wait for oncoming traffic when there should be two lanes. But it does seem to be more commonplace from my personal view.
FWIW most of the time there is someone in the car. I just don’t get the sense many of these people need to do this.
Nobody is sitting in a car near a mall entrance for recreation. They have a reason to be loitering near the mall entrance. Could most all of them go find the nearest parking space and loiter there instead? Sure.
The “broken windows” theory begins to apply. When nobody loiters in the fire lane, there’s a large obstacle to anyone even thinking they could loiter there, much less doing it. So most people don’t. OTOH, when you’re driving up to pick someone up who’ll be emerging shortly and you see 4 cars loitering in the fire lane, it’s a much smaller psychological jump for you to join that line. So most people do.
I suspect the vast majority of loiterers are commercial. Uber drivers & the like. Something that’s very evident is that folks in general are willing to be civilized, take turns, stand in lines, not park in no-parking zones, etc., … until that starts costing them money. The uber driver who waits in a parking space then relies on the flaky uber comm system to get a message that their fare is standing curbside, is wasting a couple minutes and is running a non-zero risk of misconnecting with the customer and losing the fare altogether. They’re not going to willingly run that risk if there’s an alternative. The fire lane is a great alternative that eliminates that risk.
In 2013 my boss crashed her car while using her smartphone. I remember this was considered a huge dumbass move.
Nowadays I have colleagues using cellphones for joining video calls while driving all the time, and looking at documents other people are putting up on the screen! Pre Covid, other participants would yell at that person. Now there isn’t a peep as even C-Suite executives are doing it.
I’m sure you are right. The particular plaza with ten cars has a number of takeout restaurants. And if some people see seven cars blocking the lane, they might be less hesitant to just do that.
It’s pretty standard that on the roadways directly leading into big airports there are lots of signs about no stopping or standing along the shoulders. And often lots of barricades to make that physically difficult. All to defeat people who want to stop on the shoulder a mile or so upstream from the passenger pickup area then drive in once their inbound passenger calls to tell them they’re approaching that pickup point on foot with bags in tow.
Many airports have added a “cell phone lot” that’s no charge for the drivers to loiter there awaiting that call. But often they’re small and hard to get to or get from. So just stopping on the lead-in roadways’ shoulders is more convenient. So often the shoulders are lined with waiting cars.