You are driving along the street looking for a place to park. There is a long stretch of parallel parking. The spaces left by other people are not long enough for you to fit in. The search is on.
We decided to answer the question once and for all: What is the best way to parallel park your car? There is a simple answer that our research has found.
You should leave as much space as possible at the other end of the parking space. Just remember to leave yourself room to get out.
A quick look at the street outside your home will show that many drivers think parking in the middle of the space is the best place to park.
Optimizing how we park our cars in cities is important because free parking spaces are a limited resource.
We took to our cars with a vengeance as the world slowly came back. Our travel behaviors are changing as our cities are coming back to life.
People who commute are reluctant to return to public transport. You will have already seen the result based on traffic. The number of cars on the roads of Australian cities has already gone past pre-COVID numbers, and so has the parking demand.
Everyone knows where to park in marked spaces. They help manage our parking issues, but they are bad for density because every space needs to be able to accommodate a large car.
Most residential streets have parallel parking, which we focused on in our research. We can control where we position our cars here.
Drivers can follow four strategies in these types of parks.
In a situation where demand exceeds supply, there is always a car waiting to park, and the driver is prepared to wait until someone else leaves.
The best strategy for maximizing car parks? There is parking in the middle of the space. If you wanted to discourage people from parking directly outside your house, this might be useful. It's harder to cram more cars in if you park in the middle of the space.
We found that parking randomly in a space can produce better outcomes. Many drivers subconsciously use this strategy.
The best way to fit as many cars into a limited street parking space is to park at either end of the space. It doesn't matter which end you park at, and it doesn't matter if you choose the same end as your neighbors. We could fit the most cars onto any street.
Benjy Marks and Emily Moylan.
We tested four parking strategies. Cars are leaving and being replaced as time progresses. The length of the car, the width of the rectangle, and the height of the rectangles represent the cars. There is a gap along the curb.
We looked at what happens when there is only a small distance between the two places. If you live in a street with shorter curbs, parking at either end of the spot becomes even more beneficial.
What is the significance of this technique? You can double the number of cars you can fit on the road by parking at the front or back of the available spaces.
We need to manage parking carefully to encourage other modes of transport, such as public and active transport. It is a poor use of real estate to store cars on land.
In a future in which cars drive themselves off to remote car parks and free up land that is currently used for street parking, we might see a future.
If we wanted to reduce the demand for parking, we would have to encourage more people to return to public transport through measures such as lowering fares, or increasing the cost of parking or fuel. Extra car parks could be built next to train stations or bus bays.
We need to make the most of the parking we have because these measures are unlikely to happen in the near future.
In our most congested cities, the management of on-street parking remains a vexed issue. Local residents and commuters fight for the right to park in a given street.
We should make the most of the space we have as the amount of on-street parking is fixed. If you come across a parallel park, try parking at the front or back of the space.
Emily Moylan is a lecturer at the University of Sydney.
This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.
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