The Tao of Parking

In the 3 ½ years since I first set sail on the good ship Substack, I have written 170 almost wholly original essays, and while I have a list positively groaning with socially significant, largely reality-based topics waiting breathlessly to fall under my keyboard’s spell, this morning it dawned (ha!) on me that I have so far pretty much whiffed on one of America’s most fertile and fundamentally funny plains: parking.

I did reference my elite-level parallel parking ability in The Wondrous Universe of Unmarketable Brilliance (8/8/23), ability I attribute to spending my entire childhood playing sports which, like parallel parking, is a lot of calculating angles and distances while in motion. But that navel gaze in no way addressed parking’s massive influence on our lives and culture which, after exhaustive study fueled primarily by Diet Coke and Sour Patch Kids, seems to stem almost entirely from our reliance on cars to go places.

Two very large numbers render crystal America’s obsession with motoring: A) 242.1 million licensed drivers, and B) 297.5 million registered vehicles. That makes our two-person, two-car family slightly below average in gross ownership. We Yanks are pretty chill about our cars when they’re within alarm earshot, but we get needy on the road, for what else could explain the existence of 6.67 parking spaces for each of our cars, or 2 billion nationwide. City centers of metro areas of more than a million people cede an average of 22% of their land to off-street parking. Everyone who studies this stuff agrees all those numbers are stupid high, but how excited do you think the public would be about taking away millions of their beloved spots? Me neither.

Most people likely think of parking as a relatively slow and cautious maneuver that, while remarkably annoying when done by everyone who isn’t them, isn’t particularly dangerous. Wrong. One in five automobile collisions in the US occurs in a parking lot or garage, and that’s the same fraction of the world’s oil that goes through the Strait of Hormuz and look what a stink everybody’s making about that. I don’t want to bum you out, but approximately 500 people die and 60,000 are injured in parking lot/garage crashes each year. And since many people—especially small children and stooped old people, because they’re harder to see—are hit by cars backing out of spaces, I no longer lampoon people who reverse engineer their massive machines into lot and garage spaces, for while it is certainly more irritating it seems equally certain it’s safer. I do it for the kids. And none of this include all the crashes caused by people looking for street parking instead of at the road.

But let’s shift gears to the cheerier parts of parking: the preamble, the prowl, and the performance. If, like me, you live near pleasant, relatively reliable public transportation, driving can feel entitled, which can lead to guilt unless quickly rationalized in the following manner: “Let’s take the EV.” If you don’t have an EV, just grab keys and head to the car before the discussion starts and odds are you’ll be fine. Or, if you think finding a spot on a Saturday night when your biorhythms are low is setting yourself up for failure, by all means take the bus, subway, trolley, whatever you got, because while at 16 cars meant nothing but freedom, later in life their absence can be equally freeing. I would include something here about rideshares and responsible drinking, but I don’t want to.

So you’ve decided to drive. Sometimes you feel the parking karma before you even get in the kar, but even then you need a strategy. Well, you don’t need a strategy, but I can’t leave this part blank having set it up and all. Parking, like so many of our seemingly mindless and recurring activities, is something of a Rorschach test. Take one friend’s dictum: “People who see a parking spot two blocks away from their destination and take it just don’t believe in themselves.” (If you’re looking for a more festive, group Rorschach-like activity, I recommend buying a bunch of gingerbread house kits—they go on sale after Xmas—and inviting your most emotionally complex friends over to let loose their inner demons with icing glue and rainbow sprinkles.)

I’m a fair stickler for parking legally, though I realize others like to roll the dice, amortizing parking tickets as the cost of doing business in this realm. But whether finding the first reasonably close, legal space revs your engine, or you simply must make sure the primo spot isn’t open before you find something close and quasi-legal, eventually you may have to parallel park, and this can produce anxiety, or so I’ve heard.

Successful parallel parking, like most things we do all the time but never study or practice, is all about confidence. You know that saying you kinda hate but kinda love: “Dance like no one is watching.” It applies equally to parking. Like when you had to take the minivan downtown on date night because you sure as hell don’t want your 17-year-old driving it, and you see a space you think you can get into, but it’s right in front of an outdoor beer garden and the hipsters are already getting ironical grins on their bearded faces as you pull up to begin your attempt. Take a deep breath, put on an Olympic athlete’s mindset—preferably a curler, given the physicality of the task at hand—and shoehorn that family truckster between the copper Cooper mini and the autumn green Subaru Outback.

I was reminded of such a scenario just the other day in West Philly when, in front of an ultra-cool café where lots of young-uns were sitting outside and everyone who works there has interesting head adornments, I slid my tiny Chevy Bolt—quite possibly the perfect parking car—into a space 99% of rational humans would not have even slowed down to consider.

(This is a slight digression, but I feel it brings us closer together when I admit things like I once got three parking tickets in a 90-minute span in Manhattan. Speaking of Big Apple parking, a great short read is Calvin Trillin’s Tepper Isn’t Going Out, about a guy who likes to find good parking spaces and sit in them, and when people ask if he’s going out he always says no. Wacky hijinks ensue.)

If I didn’t fully understand the place parking occupies in our collective national psyche, it was brought home in bold block letters during my radiation treatment for cancer a decade ago (I’m fine, thanks for asking). My treatments were at Sibley Hospital, where parking was pricey, except for radiation patients, who were afforded about a dozen dedicated, free spots. One day I asked why we got this perk, as I assume many of the other humans who might want to park there also had health-related concerns. I was told it was to give radiation patients greater incentive to show up for their appointments. I thought then and think now: “Not dying isn’t enough?”