Private property that is open to the public would be like a business parking lot like Walmart.
Public property would be any public road or street, or the parking lot of a government building like a courthouse or a park.
Private property that is generally not open to the public would be like the driveway of your house, or a parking lot of an apartment building.
The landlord may have stipulations about parking in the lease. But I don’t see how a law could dictate parking in a private lot that is not open to the general public.
If the apartment lot has no trespassing signs up the police shouldn’t be going through there on routine patrol anyway.
The presence of an asymmetry (if not it’s magnitude) seems so clearly due to driving on the right side of the alley.
When I park, I am happy to back in or pull in to a spot, and the choice is 100% determined by how easy it is to get squarely into the spot from my position of attack. This matters most when both adjacent spots are occupied (i.e., in a fairly full lot). For spots on my side of the alley (right side), backing in is easier due to the basic mechanics of steering. For spots on the other side, pulling in is easy.
But since this is the FQ forum, how about a little data. My city has plenty of small lots with the same constraints (single alley with only one way in/out) that are visible on Google Maps’ satellite view. The types of businesses or residences served by the lots vary, and the cardinal orientations of the lots vary. I scanned through about ten such lots on Google Maps, and the phenomenon is starkly present in all. The drive side always has a number of backed-in cars, and the opposite side typically has zero but sometimes has one.
I also scanned three very large lots with (1) multiple entries, (2) internal loops or intersections, and (3) reasonably high occupancy at the time of the Google Maps image. In the lots, the back-in rate was consistent on both sides of the alleys. This is expected given the more random direction of traffic flow.
I was once told that NJ had a law against backing in to parking spaces because if you back in against a building, the exhaust would go into the lower apartment windows when idling. Not sure how true but NJ does a lot of things differently.
This does raise a question, though: is the effect driven by individual choice as to whether to pull in or back in; or is it that the driver population is divided into pull-inners and back-intos, and the lot acts as a filtering mechanism for the two populations (with some allowance for the indifferent)?
I suspect it’s mostly the latter, though it may depend somewhat on the number of cars equipped with rear cameras, whether there’s a high fraction of trucks/vans/etc. with poor rear visibility, the average occupancy of the lot, and so on.
It’s not like it’s gated. Visitors come to the complex all the time. In fact, the police come to the complex reasonably often (usually for a domestic disturbance), at which point they could easily see all the cars in the lot if they so cared. The lot also, as I mentioned, has a street sign and addresses officially “on” it, which might also tend to make it “less private”. There aren’t any “no trespassing” signs.
Parking facing the Sun might make sense in winter, but this is Cleveland, not Nome, and it’s still August. There is no early-morning frost on windshields.
@Pasta 's observations make it clear that it’s definitely a left-right issue, not a north-south issue. Data from England or other left-driving countries might be interesting, but would still leave the question of whether it’s based on the side the driver sits on, or the side of the road cars drive on. Aren’t there a few oddball countries where the driver is on the right side of the car and they drive on the right side of the road, or vice-versa? Observations of lots in such a place would determine which of the two sidednesses is relevant.
I don’t think the issue is whether the police ever come to the property or have an opportunity to see the cars. I think the question is whether there are any rules about license plates, direction of parking , etc that apply to a vehicle on private property. I know in my state, plates are not required for vehicles on private property that’s not open to the general public - perhaps the police could ticket a car driving with no plates through the mall parking lot , but they can’t ticket a car with no plates in my driveway and probably not in an apartment buildings parking lot. I wonder , though, if it’s really a parking lot if the street has a name and your address is on that street.
Is the North-side more preferred, due to better proximity to the building or any other reason? If so, then I think people that leave early for work, and thus come home earlier (in essence, the people with “normal” work hours) take the north spots. These folks might have more foresight to back in, just like you do. On the flip, the ones that park on the south might tend not to think that far ahead. Also, does the trunk facing the lot make access to the trunk easier for those on the south-side? If I have groceries in the trunk, and kids in the car, I may just pull straight in for easier access Tom the trunk, without having to carry stuff from the car, through a car that is tight next to me.
*I skimmed through this thread so may go have missed some details that invalidate what I wrote. And the right/left effect seems to be the most likely cause, but that explain the full disparity?
Trunk access definitely wouldn’t account for it: To access the trunk of a backed-in car on the north side (i.e., a typical north-side car), you have to walk out to the edge of the gravel drainage ditch next to the railroad tracks, while for a backed-in (i.e., atypical) car on the south, you’d be standing on a sidewalk. The south side might be considered more desirable, possibly due to being closer to the buildings (I usually see more empty spots on the north side when I come home), but I wouldn’t expect that to be a big issue, since the north side isn’t that much further.
The US Virgin Islands are one such area. Former Dutch colonies, they became US-owned in the early 20th century at a time the Dutch drove on the left. Nowadays they almost exclusively use US-style left-hand drive cars while also still driving on the not-US-style left side of the roads. It makes for some “interesting” driving experiences on their rather primitive roadways.
OTOH, in general the USVI are the sort of anarchic lazy, crazy, “rules are for big continent people” kind of places so we might find less signal, or more noise, in trying to do a @Pasta -style survey using Google overhead photography.
Where is the complex itself? On the south side? Perhaps a majority like to park facing the complex.
Or, are there units on the north and south side?
I don’t understand this comment. To me, backing into a spot is substantially harder than backing out of a spot. I’ve never understood why people go to the hassle of backing into a spot. But, you think it’s easier. . . I guess that explains it, but I don’t see it that way.
More than likely it’s the explanation above, driving on the right side of the road you’d naturally pull INTO spaces on the far left side. But I’d expect that most people would just swerve wide to pull into spaces on the near right side.
Ask your neighbors? Maybe someone had some kind of bad experience and word got around.
Does the one side of the lot face an open field? I knew someone who parked facing an open field and the next morning found their engine compartment packed solid from drifting snow. Naturally the car would not start.
I think they are probably cars that get there earlier and are backing in while there’s plenty of space to do it. Either open spots next to the one selected on the right side, or open spots on the left side to help backup up by turning to the left initially to straighten out the car before backing in. I am assuming from earlier comments about a 3-point turn to turn around that an empty spot on the left would be helpful to backup to the right. For those who want to front in to a spot the spaces on the left will be easier from the right side.
So how wide is the lane(s) in the middle of the lot? Average car length is about 15 feet. I’d expect the center lane(s) to be twice that at least. If narrower that might be the incentive to back in whenever empty spaces make that easier to do. You may not be able to predict how full the lot will be when you want to pull out, backing up to leave could be difficult when the lot is full.
Also, does the length or type of car make a difference? Cars that are much longer than 15 feet are no longer common but SUVs and trucks may be. Mini-vans and some SUVs are more difficult to back up in, and short cars can be much easier to back up in than the ordinary car.
Backing in the tolerances are tighter if there are cars already parked on both sides versus backing out. OTOH, backing out often means sticking your rear end out into the roadway blind before you can see past the taller vehicles parked on either side of you.
So the tradeoff is better visibility versus ease of maneuvering. For people who can maneuver confidently and accurately there is no contest: visibility wins every time. For those who can’t it seems visibility takes second place to avoiding minor crunchy mistakes. At the risk of a much more major crunchy mistake.
Many, many fleet operators require their drivers to back in and pull forward out. Because they can demand their drivers learn to back accurately and thereby they gain the reduced risk of crunchy accidents backing out.
Cars are not symmetric front to back. The front wheels turn, and the back ones do not. Backing in is mechanically possible from a lot more approach paths than pulling in is. This is just like parallel parking along a curb: you can’t parallel park into a tight space by driving forward. You have to back in. It’s not that people are parallel parking in reverse because they want to. It’s mechanically the only way. And for the same mechanical reasons it is “easier” from tight approach paths to back in to normal parking spots (with “easier” in quotes because there is a skill element, to be sure).
This changes a bit with backup cameras. I have better visibility from the rear, because the rear camera is all the way at the end of the car, whereas for the front I’m behind several feet of hood and dashboard. If I had a box van on either side of me, I’d definitely prefer to pull out in reverse due to the camera.
AFAIK, some cars now have cameras on the front to give the same advantage. Though in that case, you could just black out the entire windshield…