No, please, keep the kids in the strollers. Just dial back the feature bloat on your stroller, and be aware of when you’re blocking other people with it. My favourite bit of stroller obliviousness (strobliviousness?) about where their stroller is comes from parents standing on a sidewalk waiting to cross a street - with their stroller stuck out onto the road!
People who panic when they’ve realized they’re going to miss their exit or that they’re about to take the wrong one.
Jesus Christ, don’t cross two lanes of traffic suddenly or swerve back onto the interstate! Calm the fuck down. Take the next exit and turn around or turn around and get back onto the interstate if you’ve made a mistake. But no, better to threaten your life and everyone else’s around you by panicking.
One of these days, I’m going to see someone realize they’re heading towards the wrong interstate interchange and smack right into the concrete divider as they decide to correct their mistake at the very last second. There’s been signs telling you which lane to be in for the last two miles, fuckless dipwit.
Does this happen outside of cheesy sitcoms where someone becomes someone else’s butler?
And doesn’t this scenario happen a lot more often between people backing out of a space and someone else just driving by?
I don’t mind the strollers that much (though we rarely ever use them ourselves. We’ve always had them, but the need just never seems to arise), but for some reason it bugs me when the kids in the strollers are well above the age when they should need one. Personally, I think if they can walk, they should walk. I do understand for longer trips that toddlers get tired, but I see kids that look like they’re 8,9,10 years old reclining in these things like fat little Roman princes while their parents attend to every snap of their chubby little fingers. Make the little shits get up and walk. I was walking a mile to school in the snow at that age. If my buddies had ever seen me in a stroller at 10 years old, they would have beaten the shit out of me, and rightfully so.
Another beef for me is people feeling the need to share their loud shitty music in parking lots.
Also, sideways baseball caps, people making out in public and groups of loud, obnoxious drunks in stores or restaurants.
As to the cigarette butt kerfuffle, I couldn’t care less. Nobody throwing a butt on the ground has ever had any impact on my life in any way.
Justin_Bailey, here is the thing: Almost everyone pulls into the space, then backs out. In fact there are some municipalities that have actually codified that this is how parking must be done. I poked around my own city and find reference to this for angle parking, though not specifically perpendicular parking.
If you think about it, it makes sense that this is the right way. When you back into a parking space you have a greater chance of jamming up the flow of traffic than you do when you back out. Simply stated in the vast number of instances you are going to be faster pulling out because you have more room.
So what this means is that pulling in and backing out is something that is expected in an parking lot whereas people pulling through is not. I suppose that if we were meant to pull through the line between spots would be a dotted line, not a solid one.
I think that I know why a lot of people do this and why it bugs me so much. See, I think that people do this because when you back up you have a lot tighter turning radius and can get into a tighter spot. This is usually necessary for vehicles that (IMHO) are too large for the urban environment. So my experience with the person that backs in is that they tend to make it harder for the cars next to them and that they also tend to (as a rule) be sort of sloppy about it.
I realize that this is one of those issues that will never, ever sink in to the people that back in and pull through.
Cite please. Lots of people pull through and, as you yourself said, municipalities do not codify it in law. Angle parking is a very specific instance where doing a pull through will actually put in 2-4 depending upon how bad you are at it.
Or the need to share their loud, shitty music anywhere at all within hearing range of people who Do Not Want.
Here’s a clue, asshole with the loud music: if the bass of your music as you drive by my building causes my windows to rattle, it is too fucking loud. How the hell can you even expect to hear a siren behind you?? And next time you fucking do it, I will come to your home and force you to listen to Barry Manilow, James Taylor and Neil Diamond at max volume for three hours. 
There may have been a thread on this before but here goes, anyway. People (almost always males) who walk out in front of you as you drive down the street in an urban area. They cause you to either slam on your brakes or hit them, knowing that you won’t do the latter. Honking your horn could get you shot. Many times they will spit as they pass in front of the car. I’m convinced its a conscious effort to claim turf. If Darwin’s theory were at work here I’m not sure who would vanish first, the jay walkers who get hit or the drivers who don’t stop in time and were subsequently killed by the by-standers.
Oh, the people I know who back into parking spaces do it because they entertain fantasies of being badass bank robbers.
OK, I will do some of the work here:
Franklin Tennesse has prohibited it in city garages, though not for the reasons that I have stated.
Ceder Rapids is a little more explicit
"Do not back into stalls. Backing into a space is prohibited in all parking facilities. Violators will be ticketed and vehicle may be towed at owner’s expense."Again this seems to be for city facilities.
This is from the Troy University
Motor vehicles must be parked within the markers in all campus parking areas. Parking on or over a line, curb, or backing into a parking space is a violation of regulations.
University of Wisconsin: “Because it’s a violation and you will be ticketed. The length of the rear wheel to the bumper is longer than the front wheel to the bumper; and, by backing into a space, there is a greater chance of an accident and damage to your vehicle. If you’re backed into a stall, it is difficult for the ticket writer to observe your permit. Also, some vehicles may not have a front license plate.”
Anyway, these are obviously all over the place and not all of them are cities. A lot of them are colleges and the like. This is not by any streach the law of the land. But it will show that there are, indeed, cities and institutions that prohibit this. So I am not just having crazy time.
On the point of the pull through I would invite you to consider this: There are all sorts of markings in parking lots that use the standard conventions that we see on city streets. There are stop signs, yellow curbs where we are not meant to park, spaces with diagonal lines where we are not meant to park solid lines surrounding spaces (as oppoesd to the dashed lines). Pretty simple.
I like pulling through to the next space, so I’m facing out. No backing in, no backing out. Safest way to do it, IMHO.
I freely admit to being obtuse about such things, Ludovic, but what does “IC” mean in this context?
It’s the Democratic Party, rather than the Democrat Party. Calling it that is used deliberately to slur the party, both as a refusal to associate it with “Democratic” values, and as an attributive adjective which defines a person by that lone characteristic rather than the content of their character; for instance, “Chinese Person” compared to “Chinaman”.
It gets on my nerves when people don’t watch out for their very young children, toddler or barely-past-toddler age, when they are on a sidewalk on a very busy street. The traffic is crazy, cars zipping by, and you are more concerned with taking in the sights than making sure that your child is safe? I sure hope that the kid doesn’t see something shiny in the street! Nutty parents!
Of course it does. I don’t think anyone would care all that much about backing in or pulling through unless they’d been in a situation where it directly impacted them. The people saying it pisses them off aren’t just annoyed by the mere act, they’re annoyed because someone engaging in it has inconvenienced them at some point in the past.
The difference is that there is a good chance that the person waiting for you to back out doesn’t mind waiting because now they have an open spot. Whereas the person intending to pull into a spot only to have it taken by someone pulling through, now loses that spot and has to keep looking.
(bolding mine)
And what these idiots don’t seem to realize is that sometimes it doesn’t even have anything to do with “taking it easy” or “rushing” or anything like that. If you stop moving at the bottom/top of an escalator, you *will *get knocked into. There is a huge metal machine forcefully pushing people into you, they cannot stop even if they wanted to.
2 things…both accentuated because I work in retail.
I will second the “ipod zombie” and add the people who will walk around my store with their ipods plugged in. You are really that against any human contact that you have to have in those godawful earphones in your head while you’re shopping?
Children on leashes. I actually don’t see this as often as I used to growing up but if you can’t control your child enough for him/her to be by you, than you don’t deserve to either have a child, or bring him/her in public.
Also…to make a long winded rant very short, the people who will shop in my store and just leave things places, or overall be rude because “it’s not my job”. It’s somebody’s job and a little courtesy for us goes a looooooooooooooong way
It has never happened to me. And I think many of the people complaining are indeed annoyed by the mere act.
There may be a chance that they are waiting for that spot, but I wouldn’t call it a good chance. In many cases, they are simply trying to leave the parking lot as well. I have put on my brakes quickly many times when I realized somebody was quickly driving by me at as I was trying to back out. Never had any problems driving out forwards.
Until vehicles are reduced back to a manageable size, I will continue to pull through when I can because it’s safer for ME in my tiny Corolla.
Not Barry Manilow! Have you no heart at all?
Though actually, as long as I don’t have to listen to Barry, I could get behind that. My sister had an enormous crush on the guy when we were teens.