In Defense of Parking Lot Mindfulness
How do you feel about driving in parking lots? Are you comfortable? Relaxed? Or are you extra alert and hyper attentive? When you pull into an angled parking space and then continue to pull forward into the next, successive row of spots, are those lines angled in the opposite or the same direction as the lines you initially pulled into? When you pull forward, is the front of your car facing the direction that traffic is flowing? Or is the front of your car facing (even slightly) against the direction of the flow? How you answer this question is of great interest to me.
I’d like to make a case for mindfulness in the parking lots of the world. I believe that mindfulness in parking lots (throw in a little kindness, while you’re at it) could greatly enhance public harmony and improve safety in these under-monitored driving locales.
THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATION
In a civilized society there is a need for order and organization so that chaos and confusion don’t reign supreme. Imagine if there were no means for order and organization. Do you think that modern day man (generic use of this word understood) would be inclined to self-organize and self-regulate?
If your answer is yes, then I wonder how your idea of organization (or anyone’s) can be effectively communicated to others? Organizational systems are imperative for order and wonderful for interpersonal harmony, but they are nothing more than exercises in mental masturb*#!(*🤭, if they aren’t communicated and agreed upon. Right?
If you think about how it was during the time of the Wild, Wild West, you would probably not be too far off in your imagining of a current day result of poorly (or not-ly) communicated systems.
To serve as an example, I’d like to use one of my personal pet peeves: parking lot behavior. In the old days (not quite as far back as the Wild West), let’s just go back to the 70’s, parking lots had straight lines and plenty of space. Well, they really had to have plenty of space because those cars were big, right? Not SUV big. Not Soccer Mom car big. Not Hummer big, but they were large.
Here’s an image of a 1970’s high school parking lot that I found online. Even high school kids knew how to park back then. Check it out. Straight lines and rows of cars parked in organized fashion with enough space between to open your door.
WHEN WILD WAS WILD
Speaking of the Wild West, I’m not talking about the romanticized version of the West that we’ve grown attracted to through old Westerns or the heart throb stuff like Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. I’m talking about the gritty truth of wide open space, rough riding on horseback, no paved roads and nobody else for farther than the eyes could see. No need for lines here. These were the days when you got past the gates of the ranch and just giddy ‘ap’d as fast as your horse would go to reach your destination before sunset. If someone got in your way, you didn’t have to signal to pass them, you just rode around them. And besides, who would get in your way when you were toting a visible shotgun and strapped with any number of smaller survival tools that also served as weapons? These were the days when freedom really reigned.
Does anyone recall the early days of the current pandemic? Yeah, this pandemic. The one that is still going on… sort of. The early days when most folks weren’t going anywhere because they were staying safely stowed away in their homes, keeping far away from the other folks that might be a host site for the virus. Those were the days to be on the roads. Yeah, traveling back in the late Spring and Summer of 2020 was dreamy. Hardly anyone on the roads, total freedom to put that pedal to the metal and haul ass to your destination. And I’d like to tell you that it was very much like the Wild part of the Wild West with drivers freely floating from one lane to another or even across 2 lanes of the Turnpike if they had enough speed and a clear diagonal line to their targeted opening. If you didn’t drive anywhere during those months, you don’t know the freedom you were missing. Except instead of harkening back to the Wild West, this was more a forward-focused version of The Jetsons. This was space travel on land. This was like being in a real-life video game. If you weren’t amped up alert, you might accidentally get side-swiped by that driver speeding past in their flying saucer version of the Soccer Mom giant transport system. Yeehah!
But then the secret must have gotten out and more people started to venture out and the roads got more crowded. Oh, but there was no communication system to let those video-game driving speedsters know, so they just kept driving like they could literally lift off to create a 3-D lane above the traffic. It was actually frightfully impressive to watch. However, most of the time I was holding my breath and hoping I made it safely to where ever I was headed because, unlike most of those drivers, I find comfort in the lines and the universal roadway system. I know that dotted lines mean it’s safe to pass and solid lines tell me to stay in my own lane. There are so many things I can figure out by learning and following that system and, above all, there’s that wonderful feeling of order and harmony.
Well, let’s get back to parking lots. My parking lot peeve - oh did I forget to mention that I have a parking lot peeve? My parking lot peeve began long before the pandemic reinstated freedom on the roadways. Yeah, when the straight lines shifted to angled lines, everything changed. I think it started in the 90’s. The parking lot lines, not my peeve.
LINES AND MEANINGS
Some intelligent engineer must have realized that, if they just angled the lines, they could get more cars into the limited space of a parking lot. And, for the most part, cars were getting smaller. Sports cars and economy cars, foreign and luxury sedans were in the majority. Those clunky American-made cars were not as popular. And only laborers and farmers needed pick-up trucks, not the general public. So angled parking lines made a ton of sense!! Brilliant thinking. On occasion you would see a sign post revealing the code: Head In. I don’t know, maybe some people didn’t understand the code. It seemed pretty obvious to me.
As time went on, things changed, as things have a tendency to. Cars got bigger again. Well, after 2001 (September 11th to be precise) we all had to become much more conscious of protecting ourselves from those people out there who were going to come in here and harm us. So we needed to get the biggest cars we could manufacture. Suddenly a regular Jeep or a Pathfinder looked small when it was parked beside a Hummer. If the Hummer was trying to get between those angled parking lot lines, it made it next to impossible for the 2 cars parking on its right or left to fit between their orderly lines. If they just thought about it and parked ‘head in’ on the center of the white line, it would limit the fallout. While, at first, this might look a bit self-ish or even the opposite of mindful, it’s actually quite mindful. Think about it, when they park ON the white line, they allow the others to their right and left to fit into their neat little lines with plenty of room to swing open their doors without anyone getting hurt. And then only those 3 vehicles are impacted. In other scenarios, an unspecified number of vehicles could be impacted via the “domino effect”.
At this point we had even bigger vehicles, fear and the need for protection, and then something really important started happening. Life got busier and the pace of things seriously sped up and people were in a hurry. They had to get places. They had to get there quicker because they had so many things going on that they had less time and had to pack more things in, so they had to drive faster and park in ways that were convenient for them to be able to achieve their intentions. To hell with everyone else. Rules (like white lines and stop signs) seemed to become merely suggestions. And driving in parking lots (which usually have a 10mph or lower suggested speed), suddenly became even more dangerous. A kind of “every person for themselves” mentality seemed to have become the unspoken, but obvious rule.
BACK IN / FRONT IN - WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
In my research and investigation about my peeve and for this blog post, I discovered that AAA might be behind the sudden confusion that started driving me mad in parking lots with angled lines. I learned that every year around 18,000 people are killed or injured backing up. Apparently, most of these accidents take place in driveways and parking lots. The latter, in no way, surprises me. I actually am impressed that the number is so small based on the parking lot behavior that I’ve witnessed. Back in 2018, based on these numbers, AAA began advising people to back in to parking spaces to avoid having to back out upon returning to their car. Backing out of the space, it seems, was the cause of the accident. Advising people to back IN to a spot, required them to signal (which most people don’t), drive past the spot they are targeting (potentially confusing for the drivers behind them), and then reverse in to the spot and between the angled lines.
In this 2nd diagram, I’ve labeled the players differently. Imagine that there are 2 cars driving here, the ‘parker’ and the ‘non-parker”. The non-parker is driving behind the first car. If the parking car doesn’t signal (again, many people don’t), the non-parker needs to glance away for only a moment and they might find themself in a collision. In this scenario, mindful communication (signaling) and mindful attention are both critical. Without mindfulness, even backing in won’t rescue the driving public from the perils of backing up in parking lots because… they are still backing up!
LINES DON’T LIE
If the lines you are backing into are pointing the opposite direction of the traffic flow (as it’s pictured below), imagine how the driver would have to navigate in order to get out of that space if the lot were full. It’s a Rubric Cube of a puzzle for the mind. I’ve drawn the lines in yellow to show how those lines would look if this car were to be mindfully parked and then to readily exit WITH the flow of traffic in their lane. And this is where my parking lot peeve goes off the rails. Because this is the kind of thing I witness in the parking lots of some of my favorite places to shop, which then brings my enthusiasm for shopping down many notches due to my aversion to driving in their parking lot. (Sidebar: Do you know that I was once verbally assaulted by an angry man in my neighborhood USPS parking lot because I suggested that his lack of signaling nearly cost us an accident.)
The idea that a driver pulls in to a ‘head in’ spot that is quite obviously a ‘head in’ spot and then drives through to the next aisle and into another ‘head in’ spot… that is pointed in the opposite direction, like the SUV pictured here, is more than just dangerous. I’ve seen more than one innocently parked car hit by these drivers. (By the way: If you’ve ever come back to your own car to discover you were scraped or dented or worse, I’m thinking you might consider adopting my personal parking lot peeve for yourself. :)
With the tiniest amount of mindfulness, shoppers around the civilized, consumer-based world could probably statistically improve the safety of parking and parking lots by 50%. That’s just a number I’m throwing out there, but truthfully, if you consider all the simplicity offered by those solid white lines, just a slight shift in brain activity could cause a wonderful ripple effect.
If you are a head out parker, and you like the idea of driving through one space to get to the next row so you can be in a head out position, I beg you to notice the direction of the lines and the flow of traffic in that next lane. I beg you to adopt some present moment awareness to observe the circumstances that you find yourself in and think of the next person who will come along to park next to you, behind you or across from you. Head out parking in angled spots only makes sense when the head of your vehicle is pointed into the flow of the traffic. Mindfulness always makes sense no matter where you are pointed.