I always put my turn signal on to show that I’m about to …. turn into the parking space. My attitude on people who ignore that is the same as people who have no idea how city driving works and ignore it when I’m trying to parallel park, or who park the objectively unsafe way because they don’t have the skill to back into parking spaces themselves: you should not be driving at all if you can’t handle this stuff. Start learning the bus schedule or budgeting for Ubers, we don’t need you behind the wheel if you’re this unskilled at how traffic is supposed to work. I bet enforcing this by law (revoking licenses) would be a big safety benefit.
I saw an interesting parking phenomenon the other day.
I’m walking in parking lot serving a grocery store and a strip of a dozen-ish small retail storefronts. Plenty of spaces, the lot was maybe 60% occupied.
The lane I’m walking along is perpendicular to the store fronts and has parking spaces on each side, all set 90 degrees to the axis of the lane. The lane is striped for 2-way traffic. All the spaces have tire bumpers so nobody can pull through one space to occupy the facing space in the adjacent lane.
On one side of this one lane, 7 of 9 cars were backed in. On the opposite side of the same lane, 2 of 11 were backed in. Each side had about 15 spaces total, so still a few empties. All told it was 55% nose in, 45% back in. But the spatial distribution was very skewed. I could not see any reason that might be so beyond luck.
I never see anyone use their turn signal to indicate that they’re about to back up into a parking space that they’re driving by. Never.
So why don’t you save your invective for all those backup drivers who don’t do that. I agree with you that they should give up driving and rely on Uber and the rather spotty public transportation we have in my exurb. That would make life much more pleasant for the rest of us.
Random numbers are clumpy. 
Strange coincidence that this thread was just bumped. Speaking of bumping…
We had an accident in our office garage this morning and indeed it was someone backing up. Backing into a parking space. Hit the door of a car when the person in that care opened it into the space the back in parker was backing into.
It seems the warning bells go off when you’re backing into a narrow parking space. So he didn’t pay attention to exactly what it was warning about. Even though the damage looked minor and there were no injuries, the car was not drivable and had to be towed.
It was indeed a freak accident. In the past eight years we’ve had several accidents in that garage, most of which involved cars backing out of parking spaces. Just ironic that this happened so soon after I was involved in this discussion here.
Even though I’m clearly in the “park front-in” crowd, I also think this sounds like a freak accident, as you state, and I don’t think it’s a good example of why not to back-in park. Weird, freaky shit can happen when you are parking, no matter how you’re parking.
And now I’m at a hotel that is part of a residential-hotel-retail mega-development with parking issues. There is aggressive enforcement of the 90 minute maximum parking for retail in the parking lot. The hotel issues a decal for their guests and the residents have a sticker. The parking garage is for hotel guests and residents. Both are required to park back in, presumably so that the parking enforcement (private) can check the decals easily. But the parking spots are tiny and people last night were struggling mightily to back into them. You could tell which cars had auto park. But of course once in the spot, you couldn’t open the door get out of the car. Most cars were encroaching on the yellow buffer box between spaces.
This development was built in 2021-2024. Long after cars got bigger. I assume the spots are the minimum size allowed by some law or regulation passed in the 1980s. And to comply with the minimum number of spaces per residential unit and hotel room zoning/permitting requirement.
I would guess a third of the cars in the hotel guest level were parked head in anyway. Directly facing the “No Head-in Parking” signs. I’m betting some of them don’t understand what “head-in parking” means, some didn’t notice the sign and others couldn’t park back in into those narrow spots if they tried all day.
Sounds like a lot of spaces in Seattle. Space is at such a premium there, so many lots make spaces as small as possible. That’s a big reason why I was happy to buy such a small car as I have now; when I bought it, I was working in Seattle and even though my previous car was a smallish compact car, I still struggled to park and get out of my car. My current vehicle is really narrow, so I can park almost anywhere, which is glorious. The only real downside is that there isn’t a lot of room to haul stuff, but it’s still big enough for most of what I need to transport.
My wife and I live on the end of a cul-de-sak. So very little traffic. We each have our own garage.
We both back in park into our respective garages (they are connected in sort of an L shape). It’s easier.
I’ve never pulled into my garage, always back in.
One bit about this whole deal that affects back-ins as well as head-ins is the people who can’t park straight, thus causing that in the adjacent space either front or rear passengers can’t get out. Oh, and the person next to me today in the little subcompact who parked with their tires over the divider line leaving a third of a space open to their left. Good luck climbing over your front console to get to your driver seat, bud.
For sure someone who’s badly parked and wrecks the adjacent space pisses me off too. But when I park less than well it’s often to make up for somebody encroaching on my space. So I split what room is available and may encroach on the space on the other side. I’d far rather move on to another unobstructed space but sometimes that luxury isn’t available.
Anyhow, so let’s say I park badly because the person to my left has parked badly. So I’m crowding the car on the right at least a bit. Some time later the car on the left leaves. Now all anyone can see is that I parked badly. Not why. So the person on my right, or the person who wants to park in that right side space later after my right side neighbor has also left, are both thinking bad thoughts about my momma when it wasn’t my, or her, fault.
My point being when I see a badly parked car I at least consider that they were sorta forced into it by pre-existing bad parkers and lack of other spaces to use. That’s an easier assumption to make when they’re close to parallel but offset a bit left or right. In instead they’re strongly diagonal in their space I assume total idjit / careless parking on their part.
Obviously in lots with many free spaces blaming bad parking on earlier adjacent bad parking is a much more tenuous assumption. That’s also where I’ll refuse to play that game by instead parking wherever I have to that’ll give me empty spaces on both sides.
But if there are lots of empty spaces, why even care about how others have parked? Just go somewhere else.
Yep. As I said twice.
Not yesterday, when we went to the zoo and a jackass in a Mustang parked crooked, sticking over the line into the space to their right. Which forced the adjacent car to park far to the right, and meant we almost couldn’t get back in our car when we were leaving.
There was literally nothing to the left of that Mustang except some landscaping. They were just selfish, lazy, careless assholes.
And the zoo gets filled up fast. When we tried to go on Monday, there were literally no spaces. Some folks in pickup trucks parked on grass. (Not an option for us.) We had to just leave and reschedule another visit, so we came back just after the zoo opened next time.
And if the Mustang had departed before you returned to your car, what would you have thought of the person next to you? That’s the person I’ve referring to. The probably mostly innocent victim of a prior bad parker.
And yes, selfish, incompetent, or both, parkers are a scourge everywhere. Shame there’s not a right of citizen’s towing akin to citizen’s arrest to re-educate / re-motivate bad parkers wherever /whenever they are found.
I wouldn’t know what to think, because I don’t know what the situation was like when they initially parked.
And to go back to the OP, I prefer to back in because my Subaru has a CVT (continuous variable transmission) and when I shift from reverse to drive there is a 1.5 second delay before I can drive. When the car is hot. Longer when cold. So if I back out into traffic I have to sit unmoving for a couple seconds before I can start moving. It’s a long time when you are watching traffic coming at you. Otherwise I would just pull in forward as I’m a procrastinator and would prefer to put off the reversing part of the equation.
Ummm. Wouldn’t you just put if from D to R or R to D and put your foot on the brake and then move? That’s they way it’s done. There is no delay.
The main issue I have with that is: this will GUARANTEE that I wind up buying more stuff at the grocery store than I planned, meaning I can’t easily load it into the back of the car.
First world problems….
Subaru put a software delay into the system to protect the CVT. I back up, shift into D, and the car sits there for a couple seconds.
Here’s the AI response when you google “Subaru CVT reverse delay”.
A slight 1–2 second delay when shifting from Reverse to Drive is considered normal for many Subaru CVTs, often due to the design of the forward/reverse clutch packs. This behavior, characterized by a momentary hesitation, is most common when the vehicle is not fully warmed up or when on an incline.
When I first experienced it I called the dealer who told me that is normal.