In my Rules of the Road (Illinois), setting the brake is mentioned, but turning the wheels is only required on hill parking. I have never in my life seen anyone turn the wheel towards the curb purposely on the flat streets of Chicago.
edit:
Actually, the hill parking rule makes it seem like the parking brake is optional:
I didn’t skip it; I just thought you were some sort of crackpot. Well, not for your reasoning, but the legal thing. Turns out I’m the crackpot, at least here in my home state where I do most of my driving:
Ah, I see. We have “parking brake” or placing in park and killing the engine. I guess the parking brake only applies to manual transmissions, then. On a grade you’ve go to turn in the wheels with any transmission. (Can’t say that I’ve ever parked on a grade, unless you get out a theodolite and say, “a-ha! Your car is inclined by 0.02 radians you grade-parking bastard!”)
Let’s see what constitutes a highway in the former Great Lakes state (our plates now scream www.Michigan.gov; stupid license plate slogan):
Well, I’m defeated there. There are way the heck too many definitions of highways and so on. The earliest, non-conditional definition would seem to be any road that’s 4 rods in width, which is 66 feet. I think residential streets don’t meet this definition. Anyone know what precisely a highway is?
I’m not sure what you’re interpreting, but it seems to me that you’ve disproved both of Critical’s contentions. 1) You do not have to set your parking brake (placing an automatic in park and turning off the engine is enough) and 2) You do not have to point the wheels towards the curb unless you’re on an incline.
I have to disagree. People who drive with the parking brake on most likely do so because they’re in the habit of not setting the brake, and thus not having to release it when they start the car.
Even if you contend that you don’t need to set it on level ground (with which I disagree because the car could be hit while it’s parked), you certainly need to set it on a hill, and not being in the habit of setting the brake every time, you would be more likely to forget to take it off again.
Besides, it doesn’t take much of a hill for a car to start rolling. Are you going to measure the ground with a level every time you park to make sure it’s absolutely flat?
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Just above freezing in the evening, well below freezing overnight. It might be a Ford thing. All my cars have been Fords. (thats only three over nearly 30 years, and I’m still driving the last two)
Count me in as someone who engages the mechanical cable-operated auxiliary brake (how’s that for neutrality?) even in my carport. Learned it that way, am conditioned to it. (Not that keen on turning my wheels into the curb, though).
Did learn it as BOTH emergency and parking brake: to me, the MCOAB is the parking brake when parked AND it’s the emergency brake when rolling. Or, if you’d rather, both my emergency brake and my parking brake are activated by the same lever pulling on my auxiliary mechanical brake cable.
In my experience, the pedal auxiliary brake is still quite frequent in American makes and models and going strong as ever. I have seen many an Amercian midsize and compact bucket-seated vehicle with the pedal (e.g. Chevy Malibu). Heck, even this year’s Toyota Camry has a pedal “parking brake” (the better to add something like 4 cupholders, mp3 plug, AC adaptor, gun safe, etc. in the console). Which kind of peeves me, as I have a strong preference for hand-levers in this application.
So you were eating in the restaurant and just watched them tow your car away? Why? Or am I missing something?
I ate, I came out, no car. After a bit of inquiry I discovered what happened. The tow truck brought us back to where they had towed our car on the next pickup of a vehicle (they were ferrying back and forth all night towing cars). I saw them use the wheels on another vehicle that came in and they confirmed that they had to do that for mine. I also had the thing checked out afterwards so it is unlikely they had towed it dragging the parking break the whole time.