When I got back from Stuttgart yesterday and set about the always embarrassingly too-long process of finding where I parked my car in the huge airport lot, I ended my search with a bit of an unpleasant surprise. To be fair, nothing bad actually happened, but the scene I arrived at was a sort of frozen moment of a close call, and it got me wondering. What I found was the scene you see up above there, where that GMC SUV had been parked unsettlingly close to the face of my little Nissan Pao.
To me, even with no actual contact, this feels too close. If it was me parking that GMC and I walked out and saw this, I’d get back in the car and back up at least six inches or so. I just wouldn’t feel right about parking my car so precariously close to another car.
If we look at the photo, you can see the GMC is actually over the dividing line of the two spots:
In the upper part of the photo you can clearly see the line that divides the spots on the left from those on the right, and that GMC’s nose is definitely flopping over that line. There’s maybe an inch and a half to two inches between our two cars? Again, there’s no contact here, but this still feels wrong.
David and I encountered something similar – though worse, as there was contact – at Pebble Beach last year, and made this little reel:
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Now, my situation is a bit different. There was no harm done, at all. But it’s also not a parking job I would personally feel comfortable with. The side-to0-side parking closeness rules I think are a little more clear, because you need to leave enough room for someone to open their car door, ideally without anyone dinging anyone. But front and rear? There really aren’t established rules.
In parallel parking along a street, especially in a crowded city, things tend to get very tight, which can make exiting the spot a challenge, or, for people who are okay with the practice, sometimes a touch method is just used, letting bumpers bump and grind with the ruthless abandon of crabgrass.
But in a parking lot? In a parking lot, I think you simply shouldn’t park like this. Even without contact, it just makes everything feel wrong and unsettled and precarious, and why would anyone want that? You wouldn’t, that’s why!
So what’s your rule? Is parking as close as Dr. GMC Acadia did to my Pao okay? Is anything good as long as there’s no touching? Or are there standards and rules for parking life?
Personally, I think you need to at least keep the extremities of your car within the bounding lines. If the ass hangs out a bit into the main lanes, well, okay, but everything else? Stay in the lines.
What do we think? Tell me, dammit!
18 inches is my normal minimum distance, with 8 being the absolute minimum. Anything less than 8, and I’m gonna back it up a bit.
Definitely too close. So if it’s a front engine car, might need access to jump start, especially in an airport parking lot where it might have been sitting a long time. If it’s not front engine, frunk access, again particularly important in an airport. Park between the lines.
Over the line, so he’s too close.
It has to pass the leg test. Common courtesy is to leave at least enough room between both vehicles to walk (or at least shuffle) between the cars’ noses. This lets passengers get to the right door as quickly as possible without walking all the way around the car no matter what direction they reach the car from.
I’m almost certain it’s an unwritten law here in Autopia (or maybe it’s the 11th Commandment, I don’t remember)…Once you pull in, you “own” the real estate within the painted lines, of the parking stall, for the duration of your stay. If another vehicle protrudes into your box, you have the god given right to “saws-all” off any prtruding parts of the offending vehicle. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works…..
Get that behemoth back into its box. That’s way too sloppy.
If it’s a car ferry where parking brakes are set it might be fine.
In theory I don’t care as long as they don’t hit me. In practice, if somebody’s parking parameters are 2-3″ they are eventually going to bump things. Thinking about it more likely that 2-3″ parking is just sloppy/don’t care, that person is going to hit somebody too. So I guess I don’t care so much about the specific instance of nobody was hit, but the general practice in the aggregate is bad and leads to bad things, especially if you drive old sports cars with low bumpers.
For me, the lines define the rule of what’s too close. Anything further back from the line is just being considerate, which isn’t a bad thing either. In this case, the GMC is over the line and clearly in the wrong. The driver should have backed it off and stayed in their own spot. If the spot wasn’t big enough for their vehicle, maybe they’re parking in the wrong section. If you both parked at the line and only had a line’s width between you, that would be perfectly acceptable.
When people end up parking this close, it’s because they bumped the car and backed off.
We all know the GMC driver got out and checked both bumpers before walking away.
If it was something like a quad-cab with 8ft bed and they did this to avoid hanging into the lane a crazy amount I would get it. I’d still think it is ridiculous to drive a truck like that to a random parking lot, but the spacing would be justifiable. Any other vehicle it just seems to add risk with no benefit.
Side note: most people I know who need trucks like that for work, drive them around at all other times with said 8.5mpg truck. I don’t get this at all. A small EV as a runabout would save them a bunch of money and be way nicer to drive and easier to park.
Well, you can’t always afford both. I agree that a smaller vehicle is often more convenient, but if you can only afford one, you get the one that makes you money.
It depends. The fuel sipper or cheap city EV may not make sense if they can’t park two vehicles or they can otherwise walk to everything. But it may make sense if it costs less for the second vehicle than monthly gas for the first.
But if someone chooses to pay ExxonMobil an arm/leg/first-born to drive a city block of Detroit iron everywhere when they have the means to reduce their fuel costs, don’t complain about fuel costs.
It almost never does though. Even comparing my Prius to my 1/2 ton truck it only saves about $75 in gas per month and most of that gets eaten up by extra insurance and registration costs on the car. There either has to be an enormous difference in fuel economy or you have to drive an enormous number of miles per month for it to make sense to own a second car solely on the basis of cost.
I don’t care how close or far I or anybody else parks when the vehicles have stopped. The issue is what happens when the vehicles are not stopped. The real problem with parking 2 inches away from your Pao is that it means that some mouthbreather with a sloppy parking pawl unwittingly piloted their pile of GM mediocrity to within 2 inches of your JDM classic and presented a very real danger to that sweet Japanese fiberglass.
Yukon* 🙂
I’m just shocked you leave your Pao at an airport parking lot. We lock ours up in our garage and take a Lyft to the airport. The Pao is super easy to break in to and steal if you can drive stick left-handed.
In other words, it is completely impossible for any car thief in 2024 to steal.
Where there’s a market there’s a will… JDM cars of all sorts are popular and profitable enough that I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if some thieves learn to drive stick left-handed for the sake of specializing in JDM car theft.
If you can’t walk between them it’s too close.
That’s “a bit tight”.
I once had an ND MX-5 and came back to it from the supermarket to find a the back of a transit pick-up overhanging the bonnet by over a foot. The driver didn’t understand why he had an angry me rapping on his cab door until he got out and saw what he’d done. I swear it was an inch from denting both front wing tops and the bonnet (hood).
If I can’t get in between the two cars to pop my hood, you’ve parked too fucking close.
Parking by braille.
You can park as close as you want, as long as you leave space for the little jolt forward or backwards when your car shifts in D or R, while having the brak pedal pressed.
Too-close parking in a lot has been covered by other commenters, but for this:
I always write the section/row where I parked on my paper ticket. It helps a lot, particularly when it is late and I’m exhausted.
I usually take a pic on my phone
Pic on the phone in parking lots, save location on google maps when parking in a city you don’t know too well. I’ve learnt both of those hacks the hard way.
Apple Maps automatically pins your car’s location, and it’s triggered when bluetooth is disconnected. Super helpful, I’ve used that feature more than once to find my car.
That’s an excellent feature that I could swear existed years ago on google maps and seemingly vanished. I started saving my parking spot precisely because one day I was counting on the auto-saved parking spot, and when I went to check the app, it hadn’t saved anything. I haven’t used recent versions of Apple Maps, but I remember it being too unreliable a few years ago. It also drained the battery a lot more and I think there was no option of downloading maps for offline/GPS-only use, which was a godsend in GMaps back when you had to pay a small fortune for data roaming.
Google maps on iOS still does it, or recently started doing it again, as it may be.
I use iOS; haven’t looked for that feature in recent times to be honest, maybe it’s there somewhere and I just need to find & activate it. Thanks for the heads up 🙂 I was super disappointed when I noticed Google Maps was no longer doing this by itself, because I used it quite often at the time. I was always traveling to cities I didn’t know, street parking and walking to my destination, and I loved not having to think how I’d find my car later.
First time that it didn’t save my parking location I panicked a bit, as I’d used navigation to walk to the final destination and didn’t really pay attention to the route or any landmarks. I had to stop for a bit to try to remember anything I saw near where I’d parked – finally I remembered the name of a cafĂ© I’d seen nearby and thankfully it was indexed on Google Maps.
If it’s the airport I’m thinking of, at one point one section of their deck had two sets of rows with the same letters (two row E’s, two row F’s, etc.), but the sets were separated in such a way that the layout wasn’t immediately obvious. One time I got back late, and was absolutely convinced that my vehicle had been stolen…the security guy assured me that my mistake happened all the time as he led me to the second set of rows, where I found my vehicle just as I had left it. So yeah, definitely use GPS or some app to mark your space in addition to writing down the section and row.