You know, there’s not some cabal of people trying to prove it’s safer to park one way or another. I seriously doubt there’s intentional bias in auto safety research.
exception that proves the rule
Except i guess the IIHS did work really hard to find evidence of increased risks from cannabis legalization. (They eventually did, but when it was legal in Oregon and not Washington, or maybe vice versa, i forget, they couldn’t find any difference and their frustration was obvious in the presentation.) But there’s a lot more social baggage around cannabis than around parking direction.
I haven’t followed the research into parking direction, because my industry (insurance) knows that it’s easier to change auto design than to change behavior, and most of our research goes into that. But when you start looking for intentional bias in the published research, i think you should reflect on your own biases.
They are surprisingly good, but imperfect. They can be fooled by quirks of lighting. Statistically, they provide a significant increase in safety, however. The IIHS has done a lot of research into these, both direct research with cars in their testing lots, and statistical research on similar cars with and without the feature. As it’s often an option, and is phased in over time in a model with few other changes, they can look at the same car each way and compare how it does.
There are individuals who do studies who have preferred conclusions in mind, who already “know” what the answer is, and who report findings in biased ways. In all areas. All the time.
Yes, this. I don’t get all the controversy. If one is skilled at backing into a space, it’s generally safer. Just seems like common sense. I don’t back in to parking spots all the time-- I do on a case-by-case basis. One place I don’t back in is when I visit the grocery store, since I load groceries into the back of my Jeep. And backing out of there is always an adventure. Many times I have witnessed or have myself almost gotten dinged from someone across from me also backing out and not paying attention. Or people driving down the parking lane way too fast and not watching for vehicles backing out.
Sure, but i wouldn’t expect a bias in the number of people doing research one way versus the other. I don’t know how much research has been done into this topic, because there are so often other compelling considerations (like wanting to move stuff from your shopping cart into your trunk) but i would expect the body of research as a whole to be relatively unbiased. And sloppy, only because almost all research is sloppy, especially observational research.
I can have sympathy for an argument that appeals to what seems like common sense.
I have however had much experience with “common sense” predictions that turn out to not be true.
No dispute of the following facts:
Lots of accidents occur in parking lots.
Most drivers pull in park.
Some minority, for some reasons, are different than the majority and back in park. They are a select group.
In absolute numbers more accidents occur in the less select majority population. In one study, in a circumstance that only allowed back in parking with extra effort to get a special plate at extra cost, back in parkers had some lower rate of accidents, maybe statistically significant, unknown. That appears to be the sole study on the subject. Not @puzzlegal any body of research.
Drivers are often both very distracted and in a hurry in parking lots.
My hypothesis is that distracted in a hurry driving behavior is the major contributor to accidents in parking lots and that suddenly getting everyone to back in park would not change that.
That this question even arises tells me you live in countries where the parking spaces are wide and/or access lanes are wide and unhampered. Where I live if you drive forward into a space it may be literally impossible to drive out when new obstacles arrived while you did your errand.
Because the front wheels steer while the rear wheels do not, it is just a geometric fact that less space is needed to back in (or front out) compared with fronting in (or backing out).
I agree with your hypothesis but not with your conclusion. Checking that a parking space is empty of cars and pedestrians is a much simpler task than checking that the street/access is and remains empty. So a distracted person is more likely to fail to notice something in the street than something in a parking space. So making the hard part (backing up) the part where distraction matters less should decrease the risks.
A reasonable hypothesis. Alternatively the same in a hurry distracted drivers will hit other cars backing in. Will not notice the distracted person walking round to get into their car while they are backing up, so on. And note, distracted pedestrians are part of this as well. People just walk without paying any attention to their surroundings, even if not checking their phones.
Parking lots are often a bad intersection of inattention and erratic behaviors. To my way of thinking the claim that back in overcomes that is an extraordinary claim that requires at least some evidence. That one study, at least based on what can be seen in the snippets, provides none.
So meanwhile back in park if you like. You probably are already someone statistically less likely to get into a parking lot accident but fine. Know that you may annoy people waiting to get past you though. And pull in park if you prefer. In any case, pay attention and be aware that others around you likely are not.
Yes, this is clearly a discussion mostly among people who park in big accessible parking spaces. That would describe most US drivers. My difficulty finding cars that are “easy to park” suggests that’s not something American car-buyers value much, in the aggregate.
Yes, back in parkers probably generate more minor dings and scrapes on both their car and nearby cars. But the intersection of drivers so distracted they don’t see the pedestrian in the extremely limited space (with extremely limited access in most situations) of the parking space, and the extraordinarily distracted pedestrian who wandered into a parking space without noticing a car backing in strikes me as necessarily much smaller than that of the distracted driver not noticing moving objects leaving their enormous blind spot to enter the risky area as they back out.
Modern cars with their proximity sensors mitigate this risk substantially. The fact that those sensors are highly effective at reducing accidents suggests that there’s a significant risk to mitigate.
You’d think maybe, but there have been many occasions when I’ve stopped suddenly pulling in because the person suddenly opened their car door, etc. Do not underestimate the degree of distraction of others in that environment. Whatever you think it is, it is more.
FWIW the arguments here have convinced me that when parking at events where arrivals are staggered but departure is more all at the same time, back in parking makes sense. Not at grocery store lots. Not at my work lot where it is often busier when I am coming than leaving. Not at Costco. There aren’t too many times I’m parking at such an event though.
some of that could be your body; a car that’s hard for you to park may be easier for me to park because of differing heights/seating position but probably more of that comes from designing a car to be wonderful in a way that is used much less than 1% of the time is probably not the highest on their priority
This is sometimes the case in the UK, especially in multistorey car parks where it seems like the people painting the lines and the people designing the building never bothered to have a conversation about the size of cars.
But another problem that happens maybe more frequently for me is that I park and when I return, my car is flanked by one or two vans - if I have backed in, I can ‘peep and creep’ out of the space forwards and fairly quickly gain visibility of the lane I am driving out into (certainly with enough leeway to stop and let someone by if they are coming). If I have driven forward into such a space, I have to reverse nearly my whole car out of the space before I can see around the vans flanking me.
The difficulty of reversing out is not symmetrical with the difficulty of reversing in, because there’s no possibility of passing traffic inside the space you’re reversing into.
The other thing to consider is that people has varying levels of driving skill, confidence, capacity, mobility etc and they don’t typically tailor their behaviours based on bulk statistics. The average of some large number of things does not necessarily fit, nor absolutely prescribe best practice to me as an individual.
It has zero to do with my body. The features i considered were length of the car, width of the car, and the turning radius. I suppose if a car had really shitty sight lines for my body i might have ruled it out after test driving, but i initially trimmed the field of possibly cars by those three criteria, and was left with few options. (I was also looking for a BEV, but the same considerations were a rather limiting constraint the last time i shopped for cars, too.)
I want to park in a city with small parking spaces and limited space to maneuver the car outside the spaces. I suspect this is uncommon in America.
Modern cars actually have excellent sensors that warn of traffic from the side. My driveway has adequate visibility into a road with slow, light traffic, so backing out is not a problem. But the side sensors always “see” an oncoming vehicle before i do.
Fwiw, I’m convinced that back in parking is generally safer, but i rarely do it. My garage is better designed for front in parking. Most of what i use the car for is shopping, where i want access to the trunk, visiting friends, most of whom either have situations like mine or situations where I’ll be parallel parking, and driving to my weekly square dance, where the lot will be nearly empty when i leave, and i know i can “pull through” on the way out.
But i can say I’ve never had a close call when i backed into a spot, and i have had a few close calls backing out. It’s just so easy for a close call situation to be present backing out.
I was surprised that the study puzzlegal linked referred to fatal and serious accidents. Silly me, I was thinking the average accident was clueless driver backing out of parking space too quickly meets inattentive driver likely driving too fast through a parking lot, resulting in fender bender.
I guess the fatalities primarily include pedestrians. I’ve long since ceased to be surprised at how inattentive pedestrians are when walking in a lot among large moving objects. I’m trying to think of any instance in which I experienced anything approaching a near miss with a pedestrian while I backed out of a space. Of course, I always back out extremely carefully and slowly. Every once in a while I’ll see a pedestrian and I stop and let them proceed, before I have backed the entire length of my car out of the space. On VERY rare occasions I’ll see someone standing there giving me the evil eye. Doubt that has happened since I got a car with the rear collision warning.
I’m also thinking about the 2 parking decks I frequent most often. Both have very narrow spaces. Not sure, but I think both may prohibit backing in. Even if it were not prohibited, I suspect a majority of drivers would have difficulty backing into those narrow spaces. Yes, there definitely would be a great number of scrapes and dings, as well as many LENGTHY back and forth attempts.
I’m trying to think of any instance in which I experienced anything approaching a near miss with a pedestrian while I backed out of a space. Of course, I always back out extremely carefully and slowly. Every once in a while I’ll see a pedestrian and I stop and let them proceed, before I have backed the entire length of my car out of the space. On VERY rare occasions I’ll see someone standing there giving me the evil eye. Doubt that has happened since I got a car with the rear collision warning.