Member-only story
About Parking Hogs (and Blame in General)
I used to get annoyed by people who parked so that their car took up more than one space, or so that there was no room to park my car in an adjacent space. I used to judge them as being selfish, arrogant, and inconsiderate. Recently, my understanding of parking hogs has changed, and so has my relationship to blame in general.
When I arrive in a parking lot and find that a car is parked so that an otherwise perfectly good space cannot be used, how can I know why that car is parked that way? The simplest explanation is that when they parked, the car adjacent to them had been parked poorly, and they were forced to park non-optimally too.
Immediately, I can see that this person might not have been guilty of a parking sin themselves but were just doing the best they could given what the previous person had done. But it’s not even possible to pass the blame back to the driver of that car, even if that car is still there, because they too might also have been the victim of a parking hog.
This chain of causation can be traced back to someone, at some point, theoretically parking a car inconsiderately. Perhaps when the parking lot was empty, someone parked straddling two spaces. However, before I go searching for a car parked straddling two spaces on its own in a parking lot so that I can place an angry note on their windshield, I…
