What’s the best way to parallel park your car? Engineers did the math
Don’t ever park in the middle of the space, that’s just rude
How can we all park better?
Everyone is familiar with marked spaces, where painted lines show you where to park. These help manage our frustrations with unreliable parking, but they are bad for density because every space needs to be able to accommodate a large car.
In our research, we focused on unmarked parallel parking, such as that found on most residential streets. That’s because here we can control exactly where we position our cars.
We tested four strategies drivers can follow in these types of parks:
We simulated what would happen in the common situation where demand exceeds supply, in which there is always a car waiting to park, with a driver who is prepared to wait until someone else leaves.
The worst strategy for maximizing car parks? Parking in the middle of the space. You might find this useful if, say, you wanted to discourage people from parking directly outside your house. Parking in the middle of the available space makes it harder to cram more cars in.
We found parking randomly in a space can produce slightly better outcomes. Many drivers use this strategy subconsciously.
But overall, the best strategy for fitting as many cars into scarce street parking is to park at either end of the space. It doesn’t matter which end you park at, and it doesn’t even matter if you choose the same end as your neighbours. Under this scenario, we could fit the most cars onto any street.
We also analyzed what happens when there’s only a small distance between driveways or intersections. If you live in a street with shorter kerbs, parking at either end of the spot becomes even more beneficial.
How significant is this technique? In many residential areas, you can almost double the number of cars able to fit on the road by parking at the front or back of the available spaces.
Issues with parking
Parking is a scarce resource that we need to manage carefully to encourage other modes of transport, such as public and active transport. Storing cars on valuable land is also apoor use of real estate. Ifautonomouscars arrive, we might see a future in which cars drive themselves off to remote car parks and free up all of the highly accessible land currently used for street parking.
If we wanted to reduce the demand for parking, we would have to encourage more people to return to public transport through measures such as lowering fares, or increasing the cost of parking orfuel. We could also build extra car parks next to train stations or bus bays.
But given these measures areunlikely to happenin the near future, we need to make the most of the parking we have.
Until then, the management of on-street parking will remain a vexed issue, particularly in our most congested cities. In Sydney, for instance,local residents and commutersvie withvisitorsfor the right to park in a given street.
As the amount of on-street parking is more or less fixed, we should make the most of the space we’ve got. Next time you come across an unmarked parallel park, try parking at the front or back of the space.
This article byBenjy Marks, Lecturer in Geomechanics,University of Sydney, andEmily Moylan, Lecturer,University of Sydneyis republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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