Baby you can’t drive your car
Driving Miss Crazy of Point Cook writes:
Dear Westie, A recent fad has emerged which I’d love your opinion on. It seems that a lot of drivers have started to reverse park into shopping centre car parks, I guess because they think it saves them time and effort when forward driving out of their carpark after their shop. However, I have found that 99 percent of these drivers are bereft of reverse parking skills and it’s much more difficult for them to reverse into a tight space, than to reverse out of the tight space into an open lane. So, while it might shave a couple of seconds off their forward-drive departure, the extra time it takes them to reverse park means they (and everyone stuck waiting for them to park) are time poorer at the end of the day. What do you think? How can we discourage this frustrating new parking trend?
Big ups to you DMC, This issue has been on the Dear Westie radar for a while now, so thanks for bringing it to the fore. At the Westsider, we are committed to fair and objective media, so we dived deeply into this topic, and we turned up reams of advice suggesting that 9/10 experts reckon you’re less likely to run over people by reversing into a carparking spot that you are going nose in. At the Westsider, we stand with the other 1/10 who reckon if you can’t control your vehicle while parking – when you’re going as slow as you possibly can in a car without stopping – maybe parking isn’t your biggest issue. Maybe you just shouldn’t be driving. Maybe you should be ordering your groceries online instead. Full-flaming-stop.
“How can we discourage this frustrating new trend?” you ask. Sadly, I don’t think we can. And I know that answer infuriates you as much as it does me.
At times like this, when consumed by impotent fury, as you and I both very obviously are, I turn to those wiser than myself for advice. In this case I consulted my favourite carparking guru, Buddha (as in THE Buddha, spiritual philosopher, not Hocking, sorry Cats fans). These words of his resonated with me:
“Do not give your attention to what others do or fail to do. Give it to what you do or fail to do.”
In other words, mind your own business. I’m sure the Buddha would have had more to say on the subject but, from what I’ve read about his life at that time, he was quite noticeably distracted, while coming up with this piece of pithy advice by some selfish nut hammer who was holding up traffic trying to reverse park his sacred cow into the last available parking spot outside the Taj Mahal.
And if the Buddha himself can’t stay in his lane, so to speak, when it comes to waiting patiently while some fool in a 4WD the size of a small island takes half a millennium to park, what chance have you or I got of keeping our cool in the same situation. Nuff said.
From last edition
In last’s month’s Dear Westie, we dealt with the issue of cyclists, pedestrians and the sharing of paths and, to put it mildly, youse all went off!
Combobble suggests users of shared paths should behave as if they were on a shared road – good advice. If you’re sharing the road with unpredictable pedestrians, kids and dogs, drive to those conditions. Yesnatalia wants families to learn how to correctly use shared paths. Good advice too. Fierce-licorice suggests we should all just share the space, which is fair enough, but it’s a pretty lame answer from someone with such a provocative name. Kim_berley29 calls for empathy and perhaps that’s where we should leave this one. Just be nice to each other people!
If anything in this column has raised issues for you, or if there’s anything you’d like to get off your chest, write to Dear Westie via editor@thewestsider.com.au
