[QUOTE=Critical1]
One more time since half of the people who dont use seem to have skipped my earlier post (3 or 4 I think)
when parking a car anywhere setting the brake is required by LAW in most if not all states.
when parking on the street you are also required by LAW to turn your wheels towards the curb (with the semi moronic execption being up hill with a curb in which case you turn away)
[/quote]
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:
[QUOTE=Critical1]
One more time since half of the people who dont use seem to have skipped my earlier post (3 or 4 I think)
when parking a car anywhere setting the brake is required by LAW in most if not all states.
when parking on the street you are also required by LAW to turn your wheels towards the curb (with the semi moronic execption being up hill with a curb in which case you turn away)
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
This sounds like one of those Car Talk debates where people focus on the theory rather than the reality. I have seen (and done myself) dozens of drive-offs with the parking brake applied. I have also seen (and experienced) people getting the parking brake stuck in the upright position and unable to move.
The chances of those outweigh the benefits by a significant factor.
Be honest. How many of you advocating parking brake use in automatics on fairly level ground actually do it? Why?
[/QUOTE]
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?
[QUOTE= Mitch Hedberg]
I took off driving the other day, and it wasn’t until I was a mile or two down the road that I realized I had left the emergency brake on. Doesn’t say much for me…but it doesn’t say much for the EMERGENCY BRAKE. They shouldn’t even call it an emergency brake…
…they should call it the “emergency make-my-car-smell-funny lever.”
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=GorillaMan]
Ummm, good point.
What kind of temperatures was this at?
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=flight]
They could, but I do not believe they do. I have never heard of them doing this, but I have heard of them mounting the car on another set of wheels as in this image I just dug up from Google. This happened to me when I went to dinner at a restaurant near where there was a Phish concert. All the local business went apeshit with towing cars they thought belonged to concertgoers instead of patrons, including mine. There were more than a dozen tow trucks running back and forth for hours. Honestly, I can’t see why they would think I wasn’t eating there. Anyway, I had the emergency brake on and they had to put the car up on wheels to tow it. If they hadn’t I would have sued the crap out of them.
[/QUOTE]
So you were eating in the restaurant and just watched them tow your car away? Why? Or am I missing something?
[QUOTE=Renee]
So you were eating in the restaurant and just watched them tow your car away? Why? Or am I missing something?
[/QUOTE]
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.
