I back into parking spots all the time and it’s much faster and safer in my opinion. I can get straight into a parking spot by putting my car in reverse. I can also back into most parking spaces from my lane without enrcoaching on the opposing lane at all. I can see clearly as I’m pulling out and let someone else take the spot much more quickly.
Because people on this board have complained about people backing into parking spots so much, I once tried to gather some data. While waiting for Mrs. Charming and Rested outside a busy Trader Joe’s with a relatively tight parking lot, I took a totally unscientific survey of the number of times that people backing in needed to change gears versus the number of gear changes for people who were driving straight in. I figured gear changes would serve as a proxy for how long it took people to park and because I thought using a stopwatch would require too much subjectivity in counting when someone started or stopped parking. I ignored people who drove straight through two parking spots so they could drive forwards both in and out. (I think that happened only once because there are few empty parking spots in the lot). I don’t remember the specific numbers anymore but what I generally remember was:
- Overwhelmingly, people driving straight into the parking spot needed to reverse and then drive forward again at least once, and often multiple times, to get their cars lined up in the parking spot.
- Generally, people backing in could either back in with no further correction or needed at most one time driving forward and then reversing again to ensure they were straight.
- The people who reversed into parking spots were generally much straighter and better centered in the parking spots than people who tried to drive straight in. They were generally diagonal in their spots, making it tighter for people parking next to them.
- The people who backed in never needed to change gears on the way out of the parking lot. They put it in drive and drove away almost instantly.
- The people who drove forward into parking spots inevitably needed to reverse slowly two or three times to get out of the spots (I wasn’t counting this though - maybe next time). They did so slowly and because their vision was compromised while reversing, they were much more likely to almost strike a moving car while backing into traffic.
At the time, I was keeping a running tally of (1) the number of gear changes each for forward and reverse people and (2) the number of cars parking forwards and backwards so I could compute an average number of gear changes for each. At first, it was a rout. The forward people on average used maybe twice or more of the number of gear changes. Then, one person backed into a spot and then pulled forward, I shit you not, over 20 times. The car was moving imperceptibly in its spot with each gear change and was only pulling forward and backwards a few inches each time (and therefore not blocking the aisle in any way). I believe this person had OCD and wanted it perfectly centered. This was the only person I saw back into a spot and reverse more than twice. This person alone threw off my totals for all the reversers and brought shame upon us all. By the time I finished my tallies, the drive forward people on average still used more gear changes in the end, but it was close.
However, as I noted above, I estimate that the people reversing out of the spots used two or three gear changes to every one for people who had reversed into the spots. I didn’t actually track this so I don’t have statistics but it was obvious that the people driving straight into the parking spots were spending way more time blocking the traveling lane when you considered the time they spent pulling in and the time they spent pulling out.
Conclusion: People who reverse into parking spots are safer and faster. We are also more handsome and debonair.