‘Lines must be redrawn in the nation’s retail parks’
There can’t be a driver in Britain who hasn’t bemoaned the slenderness of the nation’s parking bays.
In recent years, car doors and bodies have been pranged, scratched and dented in supermarket car parks and retail parks from Aberdeen to Aberystwyth and everywhere in between. The paintwork of my Citroen C3, which is hardly the most girthy hatchback on the market, has the battle scars to prove it.
The fact that the size of most UK parking spaces are based on guidelines going back to the 1970s is something that needs urgently addressed.
Times have changed over the past hafl century and many Brits now favour larger vehicles that are as wide as the Clyde and suitable for modern needs – as reflected by the recent boom in SUV sales.
But it’s not just the SUVs that are struggling to fit into parking spaces. The truth is even the love handles on a modern Mini are too wide for the country’s outdated bays.
Analysis by the Churchill motor insurance firm says the average width of a car in the UK has grown considerably since the 1970s, while the parking bays, for the most part, have remained as wide as the chassis of a Hillman Avenger.
Those Saturday shopping trips to the retail park can be stressful enough without us all needing to fork out on gallons of T-cut to repair the damage wrought by inadequate parking spaces.
Ahead of writing this little piece, I decided to conduct a little guerilla research of my own in and around a retail park close to my home on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
Armed with a tape measure, and aided by my 10-year-old daughter, I was quite taken aback to discover just how wildly parking spaces can differ in size.
When it came to bay width – not taking into account disabled bays and family spaces – the standard bays of the retail park itself fared the worst. Drivers outside Pets at Home, where we were parked, were given barely 230cm to work with.
Next worst in the vicinity were Asda, Sainsbury’s and Ikea, where the bays had wiggle rooms of between 230cm and 238cm. Getting better, but not exactly commodious.
With a solid 240cm of parking space, German supermarket giants Lidl were a little less frugal, but lagged well behind our width winner – Costco.
To the best of our knowledge, the US wholesaler’s bays offer the best bang for your bucks with a whopping 270cm of space. That’s wide enough to fit a Sherman tank and more than merits the annual Costco membership.
As for the most slender parking bays, the wooden spoon goes to McDonald’s. With just 217cm to play with, we’re definitely not lovin’ it, but we will give them some leeway seeing as their spaces were staggered, meaning that the car to the left is parked slightly ahead of its companion to the right.
According to the British Parking Association, the UK norm for parking spaces is around 240cm wide by 480cm long. Six metres is provided for manoeuvring between bays.
That all sounds about right going by the width of bays at the Edinburgh retail park, but for those who own a Nissan Qashqai or Land Rover Discovery – which will easily eat up 240cm when the doors on either side are opened – it’s just not enough.
Squeezing a family of four out of a parking space with body work unscathed is fast turning into a challenge of epic proportions and it really doesn’t need to be like this.
If trends continue and people’s cars keep getting longer and wider, while parking bays remain the same, we’ll soon be forced to exit via the sunroof.
Those Saturday shopping trips to the retail park can be stressful enough without us all needing to fork out on gallons of T-cut to repair the damage wrought by inadequate parking spaces.