I used to be such a good parallel parker in my 2002 Tundra. It was art. Throwing your truck in reverse with a steering column shifter and backing that bad boy up is one of the top 5 most masculine things someone can do.
Now I have a backup camera and people just don’t know they’re in the presence of greatness :/
hibikir_40k on
The special status of parallel parking in the US isnt there in many other places for a very simple reason: If a sufficiently large percentage of spots require parallel parking, everyone is practicing it often, and it’s a normal skill. Just like driving a manual, or having a reasonably readable handwriting. In American suburbia, you can go for a decade without ever having to parallel park once.
I for one don’t have a problem with its disappearance: Most real reasons to parallel park are surface level street parking, and that’s a bad use of space anyway. It’s like the loss of the skill to maximize the available memory to load a videogame in a 386 using MS-DOS. A formative experience in a world we don’t want to live in, no matter how proud one might have felt when they managed to get Wing Commander 2 to run with the sound card on.
centurion44 on
I learned to drive and took my test is the OG Suburban. It was not the easiest car to parallel park.
My current car is from 2012 and is such a base model that it has zero parking aids. So I’m still manually parallel parking my car.
3 Comments
I used to be such a good parallel parker in my 2002 Tundra. It was art. Throwing your truck in reverse with a steering column shifter and backing that bad boy up is one of the top 5 most masculine things someone can do.
Now I have a backup camera and people just don’t know they’re in the presence of greatness :/
The special status of parallel parking in the US isnt there in many other places for a very simple reason: If a sufficiently large percentage of spots require parallel parking, everyone is practicing it often, and it’s a normal skill. Just like driving a manual, or having a reasonably readable handwriting. In American suburbia, you can go for a decade without ever having to parallel park once.
I for one don’t have a problem with its disappearance: Most real reasons to parallel park are surface level street parking, and that’s a bad use of space anyway. It’s like the loss of the skill to maximize the available memory to load a videogame in a 386 using MS-DOS. A formative experience in a world we don’t want to live in, no matter how proud one might have felt when they managed to get Wing Commander 2 to run with the sound card on.
I learned to drive and took my test is the OG Suburban. It was not the easiest car to parallel park.
My current car is from 2012 and is such a base model that it has zero parking aids. So I’m still manually parallel parking my car.