It is.
Both my wife and I back into our grarages. It’s just easier.
I mean, if you say so. I’ve been driving for decades and I can’t think of a time when it really mattered.
Agree. When I drop my son off at school there’s a near endless stream of cars exiting the parking lot behind where I’m parked. The only chance of escape is being able to see where the gaps are.
I do not back into parking spaces. I have a hard enough time parking my car frontways, and I’m not joking.
Yeah, I realized as soon as I wrote it that it’s probably occurred. But much less often than backing out, I’m confident.
Not to brag, but I got pretty good years ago at not only backing into parking spaces, but maneuvering into tight side parking spots and backing up boats and trailers. Last Summer I got my first vehicle with a rear camera, and I don’t like it-- I can’t get used to it. I’d rather look over my shoulder when backing up, like I’ve done for the past, ohh… 45 years I’ve been driving without a backup camera.
And the stupid backup tech starts beeping a warning when I’m still like 3 feet from where I need to back up to. When I’ve parked in my garage and want to back out, for some reason the camera, since it’s a fisheye lens and can see the side walls I guess, starts beeping a warning despite the fact that I’m free and clear, and even sometimes automatically brakes, which is very disconcerting. One time I connected a trailer without the electric because I was just moving it on my property, and without the electric hookup it read the trailer as an obstacle when backing up, and repeatedly braked automatically on me.
I know I sound like an old man complaining about this modern ‘nanny tech’, and maybe that’s fair to an extent. I do kind of like the blind spot warning in my side mirrors, where it flashes and beeps if I signal a lane change when a vehicle is coming up behind me in the next lane, but I also wonder, does it take away from what should be our basic awareness of driving?
At my work, one of our “safety training” things we took online was on driving safety, and it was totally shitty. Half of it was just wrong, and it pissed me off. Among other things, it said you should always back into a parking space backward, because it’s safer.
It’s pretty safe and easy to back out of a parking space with a rear camera. Backing into a space, camera or not, fuck that. Is it “safer” for me to smash the shit out of cars to the side of me? Because in some of the parking spaces I have to park into, there is barely enough room at times, and I have to be very careful not only to be in the space properly, and not crash into adjacent vehicles, but also to be a proper distance away from them that I can open my door and get out, and not block anyone else from doing it. Going into a space is hard, getting out is easy. The safe thing is do the hard thing the easier way, and do the easier thing the hard way.
They also had stupid and dangerous information regarding pedestrians, and bikes, and so on. I can’t remember the details, just the parking one, because it was so egregiously backwards that it pissed me off.
Exactly my point.
Maybe. I read an article recently about how modern SUVs and trucks have massive pedestrian blind spots that has resulted in an increase of pedestrian deaths mainly from getting hit front-on. One of the issues is that some people in their vehicles can’t actually see what’s directly in front of their car.
Relevant article, but I’m not sure it’s the one I read.
I drive a comparatively small SUV (Honda CRV) and I still feel like I can’t see in front of me sometimes.
See..this is why I want a personal helicopter. I could just dash around doing my lame biznus and errands. And zoom home.
Yep. This is what I want.
Parking?.pfffft!
I will occasionally back-in to handicap spaces when I need to put the extra room for my mother-in-law to be able to get out easily with her rollator on the passengers side where she is sitting. In those cases, I back in with a clear conscience.
It took me a bit to get used to using the camera. I still twist around to be sure.
It’s amazing how many concepts that should be mastered by the end of high school you have to miss to fail to understand the superiority of back-in parking.
Optics (Normally taught in 11th grade physics) - You can SEE more things across a wider range through the larger windshield that you are closer to, so you want to be driving forward when you are dealing with pulling into the unpredictable, dangerous flow of traffic that is naturally going perpendicular to you, and backwards when you only need to deal with the fixed rectangle of the parking space. (You probably don’t really need to understand Newtonian optics to comprehend this but we’ll give people the benefit of the doubt.)
Lever mechanics/circular motion (11th grade again, or maybe middle school general science)- The car pivots by turning its front wheels, meaning you have more precise control of a turn when moving backwards than forwards, and it’s far, far easier to back into the parking space even absent all other factors if your goal is to acutally park parallel and equidistant to the lines and not just somewhere approximately in the area. People who have somehow managed to obtain and keep a driver’s license without ever figuring this out should consider switching to public transit or Ubers. They’re undoubtedly the same people who can’t make a fucking left turn without veering into the next lane over. This dumbass should not be driving anywhere:
Stop trying to wiggle in front-first and learn to back in properly, coming in straight to the space, and you will magically not be constantly “smashing the shit out of cars to the side,” you menace!
Moral reasoning/basic concept of community responsibility: Most people have a decent grasp on the broad strokes of this by age 6 or so. You need to worry about pedestrians, pets, bicyclists, and other cars in the flow of traffic, and backing out of spaces means you are always making a blind guess to some extent. You need to do things like take the extra 15 seconds to back in to avoid disaster when you leave. Potentially killing someone else versus a miniscule inconvenience for you - is this really a difficult philosophical problem? Apparently so, for those with a mental age of 5 who are driving on the same roads as me.
Object permanence: This should start coming in at about 4-5 months of infancy and is developed in all humans by age 2. If you think “waiting for people to back into spaces” causes “delays” but haven’t thought it through to “if they go head-first, we have to wait for them to back OUT of the space later, because the car remains in the space and must ultimately leave it,” then congratulations, you’ve been outwitted by toddlers on the low end of the IQ curve.
And this is all stuff that applies universally. Wait until we get into the specifics of things like sporting events or shift work where people arrive over a spectrum of times but all leave at once. Avoiding the backing-out delays there and instead spreading that out over the arrival window significantly improves traffic flow, saving time, gas, pollution, etc on top of safety.
That’s different. You have a legitimate reason to park in backwards in that situation.
It’s just not something people should be doing all the time everywhere. Just as it’s okay to drive in reverse sometimes, but not all the time.
Also, in my experience handicap spaces usually (not always but usually) have extra space to accommodate someone with mobility issues needing a little room to get in and out of a vehicle, or to make room for mobility equipment (wheelchair, scooter, walker, whatever). So it’s less of an issue with those spaces, as you have more room to maneuver and the space is more forgiving of where your vehicle is placed once parked.
RIP my X-Wing Fighter grandpa ran over backing out of our driveway in 1981. Mrs. Odesio prefers to back into parking spaces and she drives a giant hillbilly truck. She’s really, really good at backing up though. And sometimes it’s actually easier to back into a parking space than it is to pull forward. But I have been stuck behind some yahoo who takes a long, long time to back into a space because they don’t have enough practice.
I’m another who has an older car that has no backup camera (heck, my car doesn’t even have a screen). As someone said above, my preferred way to do things is to get far enough away from where I’m going to be able to pull through a pair of spaces, so I’m pointing out when I leave. I don’t mind the extra distance I have to walk; I look at it as a little extra exercise.
When I do need to back up, as when I back out of my driveway, I use my side mirrors. Good skill to learn, actually.
When I’ve been on Oahu the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that easily 90% of vehicles in most parking lots were backed in. It’s just not that hard to do. It’s learnable.
Ditto. And they are less likely to hit me if they are driving forward on the way out.
The reason backup cameras are now required in US vehicles is because of the rather significant number of kids run over by their parents in driveways.
Yeah, reversing in, they will be hesitant because they’re trying to fit correctly and not hit other parked cars; reversing out, they will be hesitant because of poor visibility of traffic in the space they are reversing/emerging into.
Some days you will find your progress impeded momentarily by someone else innocently going about their business. The sooner you accept this, the happier you will be.
WTF? When you’re entering a parking spot, with cars on either side, there’s a very specific position you need to be in unless you’re interested in a destructive merger with the other cars. When you’re leaving a praking spot, pretty much the whole world is open to you.