I was born and raised in Florida—where you basically have to drive everywhere you want to go. Luckily, almost all my destinations had large lots where I could easily park my car.
Earlier this year, I made a huge change in my life and drove across country to live in Seattle, WA. The moment I entered the city, I found myself doing a crash course in parallel parking. This instantly scared the crap out of me! I never had to parallel park before. I don’t even think I needed to test for parallel parking when I got my license in Florida. Living in a big city like, Seattle, you have no choice but to be forced to learn how to squeeze your car in between two others all while impatient drivers wait for you to move out of their way.
For the first few months I had to basically try anything I could to get my car into those spaces. Obviously, I learned all the wrong ways to park before learning the right way. I had this idea that I needed to jump into it and learn from my mistakes as they came about. “Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk,” as Tony Stark would say.
I wanted to share with you the “methods” that I found some-what successful. These are by no means explaining the proper way to park, but to show you my sad attempts.
The key here is to plan ahead and drive around until you see two open parking spots where you could easily sweep into one and position yourself into the other. This method involves having just as much luck as it does patience. You could even say this method is cheating mainly because it doesn’t require any skills at all. But for some reason, I get this odd feeling of accomplishment when I find two vacant parking spaces that are actually next to each other. It’s almost like fate brought me to this spot at this time and granted me a stress-free parking job. This type of parking doesn’t happen very often, but when it does you almost automatically say, “Oh, sweet!”
Excluding the high curb spots, this method only works if your car is able to drive over a low curb and plop itself into position. Due to the height of their tires, trucks and SUV’s would be the ideal vehicles for this method. I learned the hard way that any other vehicle (including my sadly curb-damaged Scion) could risk scraping the rim as it drives off the curb.
The technique here is to drive your car back and forth into the space—slowly inching your way closer to the curb. Of all three methods, this has to be the most embarrassing and pathetic way to parallel park. You are immediately labeled a “parallel parking newbie” the moment other drivers see what you are trying to do. That’s okay. It does work, but it might take a couple of minutes to reach your goal.
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