Zen and the art of parallel parking
To clear a backlog of tests, Ontario temporarily puts the brakes on some requirements
I have a complex relationship with parallel parking.
And it seems, anecdotally, that I’m not alone.
Every driver has, at some point, faced the terror or the rush — sometimes both simultaneously — that comes with eyeballing the lone parking spot within blocks of their destination, temptingly long enough to fit their car, but with a lineup of impatient drivers in their rear-view mirror.
What happens next is the measure of the complexity of your personal relationship with the parallel park. Do you step on the gas, abandon the spot and circle the block seeking another larger, less congested spot?
Or do you put the car in reverse, twist in your seat, wink and smile at the driver behind and mouth, “Watch this,” while smoothly spinning the steering wheel clockwise with the palm of your left hand?
The inspiration for this little burst of introspection, of course, is the Ontario government’s recent decision to eliminate parallel parking from the requirements for its final driver’s licence road test.
That, along with the three-pointturn and making a roadside emergency stop, were trimmed last week in hope of clearing the massive backlog of road tests built up during the pandemic.
Something needed to be done. Drivers trying to book their tests now are waiting up to a year for an appointment. Eliminating those three tasks could cut the test time in half and theoretically halve the wait time for those tests as well.
The government touts this as a temporary measure, until the end of March. And prospective drivers will still be required to perform those manoeuvres in their G2 test, which they take a year before their final one, under Ontario’s graduated licensing system.
But the suspension — and possible future elimination — of parallel parking from those tests somehow hits home.
For many drivers, it’s a rite of passage — one of the stepping stones between youth and adulthood.
Hence the current bout of misguided nostalgia. As I said, it’s a complex relationship.
And to be fair, when I say complex, I mean complex in less of a “One Hundred Years of Solitude” familytree type manner, and more of Princess Leia-Han Solo kind of thing.
Perhaps you used to loathe parallel parking until your hard-won ability to shoehorn your car into any available space became a source of pride — the automotive equivalent of Han looking back at Leia and saying, “I know.”
For me, initially, it was a source of shame. Back in the day, at 16, I flunked my first go-round at my driver’s licence because of parallel parking, largely — I like to think — because my instructor showed up with a different car after being involved in an accident that morning.
And so it was that, a short while later when I met the lovely Ms. Bonnie Edwards for the first time, my cool factor was substantially diminished — so I thought — by my lack of a licence. I had to rely on my personality and charm. It did not go well.
Shamed and chagrined, I borrowed my parents’ car and practised, practised, practised parallel parking. Until I got good at it. Good enough that the challenge of the parallel park became an adventure rather than an obstacle.
But that fear of parallel parking that dogs so many is not unwarranted. It’s not a simple process.
One driving instruction diagram I’ve seen on parallel parking breaks it down into 14 simple steps.
At minimum, it requires a rotation of the steering wheel one way, a recovery and straightening of the wheel, and a counter-rotation. All while looking back over both shoulders.
It involves spatial awareness, hand-eye coordination — while looking away from your hands — and a steely nerve.
A recent survey of 1,000 Americans by insurance comparison website The Zebra found that nearly half have “parallelophobia” — the fear of parallel parking.
Most commonly, according to the survey, that fear revolves around holding up traffic (24 per cent), followed closely by the fear of hitting another car (21 per cent).
That first fear hits Kirsti van Dorsser where she lives.
“For the last 21 years, I have avoided parallel parking at all costs,” she says.
After getting her licence at 16 — wherein she did manage to parallel park — van Dorsser didn’t drive for the next nine years. When she took up driving again at 25, she found she’d forgotten how to do it.
Now, at 47, she refuses to drive in Toronto, not because she’s afraid of driving in the city, but because she knows she won’t be able to park.
“If I have to drive somewhere where I think parallel parking might be an issue, I’ll research parking heavily in advance. And sometimes, I’ll end up parking a half-hour walk away from where I need to be, just because there’s a parking lot there.”
And yes, she admits, she has, on occasion, changed her mind about her destination based on the lack of parking.
For van Dorsser, the fear is not so much about hitting another car but about that lineup of impatient drivers in the rear-view mirror.
“It’s really nerve-wracking when you’ve got people watching you, and you’re holding up traffic. That’s the worst. It’s very anxiety-provoking. Like heart-racing, brain-shutsdown anxiety-provoking.”
It’s a phobia she says she thinks about not infrequently, one that she’d like to overcome. She’s even contemplated taking driving lessons again, if only for the sake of relearning to parallel park.
But, in the way of that is the almost paralyzing anxiety she’s accumulated over the past 21 years.
“It’s funny how much you can really sort of hang a lot of weight on something like this,” she says. “I definitely feel stupid for not being able to parallel park. It’s almost like I feel so stupid, I don’t even want to try.
“It’s human nature to avoid things that make us anxious. So, it’s not surprising to me that it is a polarizing issue because people who can do it don’t understand.”
But there’s help to be found for those, like van Dorsser, with parallelophobia.
Ever since there were enough cars to cause parking problems, there have been people trying to figure out ways to make parallel parking easier.
In 1927 Paris, a car was designed where the front wheels were able to turn inward toward each other until they were both perpendicular to the rear wheels, enabling the car to pivot on its rear wheels in and out of parking spots.
In the 1930s and 1950s, there were designs in which the fifth wheel — mounted at right angles to the others, either as a spare on the back or inside the trunk — lowered to lift the rear wheels off the ground and allow the car to pivot around its front wheels.
There were other designs that lowered dedicated wheels to lift either the rear tires or all four tires off the ground to make parallel parking a breeze.
None of these really caught on, but today we have assists — rearview cameras, buzzers and alarms, and in a growing number of cars, fully automated parallel parking.
Just pull up ahead of the spot you want and let the computer in your car take over and ease you into the space. Easy on your anxieties, easy on the cars around you.
But for some, that’s cheating. Take Alistair Moffatt, for example. As soon as he gets in a car with all those bells and whistles he turns them all off.
“I always try and pick a real tight spot to keep me honest,” he says.
Moffatt, it should be mentioned, is the world’s greatest parallel parker.
He’s a U.K.-based stunt driver who holds pretty much all the Guinness records for parallel parking, including the single parallel park, the double (with his brother), the triple and the reverse.
Moffatt doesn’t park like you and I, though. Not even close. He starts well away from his parking spot, races toward it at speed, then slams on his handbrake while turning and … skids his car into place.
He is able to do this with such precision, that, for his recordbreaking parallel park there was a total of 7.5 centimetres between his fenders and those of the cars in front and behind. Which is to say, if he’d done it precisely evenly, there would have been 3.25 centimetres between his front fender and the car in front of him, and the same for the back.
Even more terrifying — he does the same thing in reverse, screaming toward his parking spot at 42 miles per hour (68 km/h) before slamming on the handbrake to drift into position.
He notes he doesn’t park this way when he’s out for groceries. (“No. No. It’s quite anti-social, really.”)
But the world’s greatest parallel parker empathizes with those who have a parking paranoia. It’s fair to say that a large part of the parallel parking process is mental, he says, and some people just deal with parking and the pressure of waiting drivers better than others. But for those who don’t, he adds, there’s no law that says you have to do it.
“You can just find a bigger space, can’t you, really? You just keep on driving until you find somewhere suitable,” he says.
Ms. Bonnie Edwards is long since married and living out West.
She remains blissfully unaware that she is, in some part, responsible for my above average parallel parking skills.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively minor skill. But more notable for me is what I learned from that period of time; the progression of failing, trying again and repeating the process until you get where you’re going.
I discovered that my real underlying talent is, in fact, getting back up after I fall.
The cherry on top is the sheer joy of hearing somebody in my car say, “I think that space is too small. You can’t fit in there.”
Really?
Hah. Just watch this.