You might need a parking lesson

Do we need signs that tell us everything that we shouldn’t do?!!

As I’m out doing errands last night, I witnessed evidences that supports the claim that we do (sadly). I wish I had a story to tell you about a pack of children misbehaving, but it was adults doing stupid things that made me lose a little faith in humanity (maybe that’s a little harsh; I don’t believe these people represent everyone).

Call me picky, but I hate it when people drive the wrong way down a one way parking lot aisle. Don’t know what I mean? You might be one of them. But just incase I’m not making myself clear, I made a diagram to explain.

The black arrows (cars) are doing it right. The red arrow is doing it wrong.

This shouldn’t be a secret: the rows of a parking lot are angled for a reason: it makes pulling into and out of a spot easier. In fact, there are usually arrows at the beginning of an aisle pointing down the way you should go.

When some goofball decides to go the wrong way he/she causes a few issues for themselves and others. The beauty of angled aisles is that you can make the aisles narrower because you no longer have to accommodate two car widths for traffic coming from both directions. For those who are parking lot savvy, this is a problem, when dumb people decide to show off their special skills of ignoring or otherwise being oblivious to something as simple as one way parking lots. Time is wasted because both cars need to slow down to maneuver around each other.

Another problem for people who respect the parking lot flow is when you are backing out of a spot. The one way’ness of the aisles should guarantee that traffic is only coming from one direction (read: you only need to check one direction for on coming traffic) and the angled rows make it easy to check the on coming traffic and easy to pull out of with little effort or turning. Now, to be clear, you should ALWAYS check both ways for traffic (even on a one way) and more importantly people. Just because it’s a one way for traffic does not mean it’s one way for people. They will be coming from both directions so ALWAYS check. The point I want to make about the angled rows is that while they are easy to check for cars coming from the proper way, it’s very difficult to see idiots coming from the opposite (wrong) direction. I’ve been honked at by people I didn’t see coming from the wrong way, as if I’m the one doing something wrong.

Assuming there are a few people reading this that do drive the wrong direction down a one way parking aisle, I want to ask you, “Why do you do that?” I ask because you could be saving yourself some hassle by not doing what you are doing. When you go the wrong direction but then find an open spot, you can two choices: Back into a spot, or make a very awkward and time consuming ‘backup-and-go-forward-a-few-times’ effort to get into that spot. It’s not just time consuming for you. There are probably people trying to get around you. And backing into a spot, only sets you up for driving the wrong way again after you pull out of the spot, unless you want to do a very similar awkward ’backup-and-go-forward-a-few-times’ move to get out.

I guess what’s missing a “Do Not Enter” sign at the ends of the one way aisles for the dumb people. I doubt that will stop everyone, but perhaps what most of the idiots are missing is for someone to tell them to not do something.

It makes you wonder: what would the world be like without these warning signs.

I’m wondering if this bugs people too. Let’s take a poll.

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