Skid marks prove speed. Being parked on the wrong side of the street does not prove that you drove your car to get to the wrong side. You could have pushed it or towed it backwards.
Wow, does your arm hurt now?
This could be one of those laws that made more sense when it was first written.
Or, it could just be a money maker.
But when you have to turn across the street, you have no other option, and it is a predictable and expected maneouvre. When you park the wrong way, you DO have another safer option, park the right way.
Why would you even want to park the wrong way?
You’ve never parked in London, have you?
And even parking outside my parents’ house earlier today, on a wide and fairly quiet road, it was simple to park on the ‘wrong’ side, pausing at the centre of the road to check it was clear, and checking it was clear when departing (the latter speicifically featured in my driving lessons).
All of the answers so far have been about modern driving situations - but I presume the laws in question are fairly old. If anybody could work out when they might date from, it might help work out what the explanation(s) might be.
Actually, this was a bit snippy…I’ll give a (non-London) example of what I’m taking about…
One particular road I have to park on once week dates from the early 1900s. It’s not very wide. It’s terraced housing on both sides, so each house has about one car length in front of it. With a vehicle parked on each side, it’s a single-track road down the middle. The other adjoining roads are identical. So if you are driving down it, looking for a parking place, you take what you can, be it left or right. You aren’t going to spend five minutes finding a place to turn your car, because the space won’t be there.
Last I checked it was possible to push or tow a car without hurting an arm.
My arm is just fine, thanks.
The “driving on the wrong side” objection is meaningless on streets like the one in front of my house, which is basically three lanes: two parking lanes, and a bidirectional center lane which drivers going both ways must cooperate to share.
levdrakon ,
Well, parking the wrong way could get you a parking ticket only (cost - $25 if I remember correctly) – not a citation for a moving violation. And, yes, to cite for the moving violation, there would need to be direct observation (or the investigation into an accident). I brought up the driving only as a reason for why the parking regulation was developed.
AZRob
Thankfully yes, up here in deepest Norfolk there are rarely streetlights in the villages so people parked on the side of the road facing the wrong way leave their sidelights on overnight to stop people driving into their cars. Often they put up a warning triangle up instead which I assume isn’t legal but does the job just as well.
No - there are laws of physics that can be relied on.
For instance, on Florida’s Turnpike, they used to time-stamp your ticket when you entered the turnpike system. When you exited, they did a check of the time. Since they know where you got on, they could calculate your average speed. If it exceeded the limit you got a ticket. No witnesses, yet allowed nevertheless.
I was referring to the reaching you did to come up with:
If you back into a parking space in a lot that requires front-in parking, do you think that nobody is going to get tickets because the parking enforcement people are all going to say to themselves “I’ll skip this guy… he could have been towed or pushed his car into that space”?
You are going to get a ticket. We all have our sad stories - that what the judge is for.
But to answer your question, the offense is not driving on the wrong side of the road, it’s for parking facing the wrong way. If your car is facing the wrong way, I think that’s evidence in and of itself.
You’ve taken us back to square one. WHY is it illegal to park facing the wrong way?
I can understand where the OP is coming from because I despise laws/rules/policies that exist without a good reason. Example: let’s say my company bans red umbrellas. I’d be sure to ask why, even though I don’t own a red umbrella. If the answer came back “because that’s our policy”, I’d be furious. That’s a non-answer and it shows that some executive has too much time on their hands. But if the answer came back (humor me here) “there is a species of agressive wasp on the loose that seems to be attracted to red umbrellas”, I’d say that was a pretty damn good reason.
Some people like to know the justification behind the laws.
How about “It’s illegal because it encourages people to drive the wrong way into the parking space (even though occasionally, someone might conceivably have the car towed there), and it makes it dangerous to pull out due to the driver having an obstructed view (even though occasionally, someone might conceivably have the car towed back out)”.
A skid mark is sufficient evidence of speed because there’s no other explanation for it. The fact that you are parked the wrong way is not sufficient evidence of anything other than the fact that the car is facing the wrong way at the time. It says nothing about how the car got there.
Based upon that evidence alone, I would say:
Parking violation, yes.
Moving violation, no.
A current pit thread made me think of this:
A driver is (should be) trained to always check thier mirror before opening the car door.
A passenger may well be a non-driver, child, etc., and foolishly open the door into oncoming traffic.
Of course a left rear-seat passenger could cause trouble, but rear doors are typically much shorter than sedan-front or coupe doors.
Kevbo - if that were true, then the laws would have emerged as “only ever park on the left/right (delete as applicable) side of the road”, even on a one-way street. But they didn’t, so that’s not an explanation for their existence (although not a bad reason for encouraging people to park that way!)
Besides the difficulty of pulling out into traffic when you can’t see until you are mostly in the street , my biggest problem with facing the wrong way is that when I am driving at night in the rain with limited visibility (fogged up helmet or goggles is the worst), I especially appreciate the red reflective glow of my headlight off of taillights designed for that purpose. Cars parked backwards can be nearly invisible.
The biggest problem is it makes it harder to spot zombies.