When I took my (UK) driving test in 2006, there was a list of manoeuvres you had to learn, and you never knew which were going to come up in the actual test. One of them was reversing round a corner into a side street, one was reversing into a parking space. (Neither of those is ten feet wide! I don’t really see how anyone who was at the point of thinking they were ready to take their test could fail to reverse into ten feet of space.) There were plenty of others, like three-point turns and so on. Parallel parking is one of the more common ones to get on your test. I had it on mine.
Here in Holland, they don’t care whether you park succesfully or not; it’s all about the looking. You have to make sure that with every action you check all around you for other traffic, that’s pretty much all they care about.
Several years ago I was standing in the parking lot watching as my wife tried to parallel park for a driving test in Texas. She had the basic steps but ended up at least two feet from the curb. I assumed she had failed but she was given a passing score.
With the caveat that different people learn differently, it helps me to understand the “why”. The non-steering end of the car is hardest to adjust so that is why all of the procedures above tell you to back in - the effect is to get that non-steering part into the space first. Pulling in and adjusting is tempting but unless there are two spaces and you are actually pulling thru one to get in the other, it is difficult to adjust because you’ve usually left that non-steering end too far out.
Just finished coaching my daughter through driving/parallel parking. Supergoose and Reality Chuck gave good advice. Here’s my tweak on their methods:
–Set up a mock parking spot, 25 feet long, using weighted poles. I put an actual car right in front of the forward pole. (The pole protecting the car from scrapes.)
– Use the car the test will be taken in.
– Pull up even with the parked car, with about 18" distance between the cars. Put your car into reverse…
– At this point you need to find your two cutting points through trial and error. In our case they were
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When the back corner of the rear window is 6" past the front pole, cut the steering wheel all the way clockwise.
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When the outside passenger-side mirror is 6" past the front pole, cut the steering wheel all the way counter-clockwise.
That’s it. You will have a repeatable method that deposits your car close to the curb. You then pull forward a little if needed.
You need to find your own cutting points because each car has a different turning radius, and different proportions. You need to cut the wheels all the way to eliminate variables.
After the test is passed and you gradually get better at driving in reverse, you might not want to cut the wheels all the way. It swings the nose of the car way out into the street.