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Why Does Parallel Parking Always Involve Reversing?
Cindy and I were driving around in the Marina District of San Francisco looking for parking when I noticed someone entering a parallel parking spot nose-first. I said to Cindy, “You know that’s going to end up in tears: back-and-forth, back-and-forth.” I then proceeded to explain to Cindy why it works better to back your car into a parallel parking spot. It’s not something she had understood before, perhaps because she had never really thought about it. I wasn’t even aware that I knew why head-first parking was a problem. Maybe I didn’t: I have often driven my car head-first into parallel parking spots. I suspect that it’s something that most people don’t understand simply because they don’t think about it.
A few days later, I was having dinner with the CTO and co-founder of Cabin, “The dreamiest way to travel between LA and SF” who happens to also be my friend. He was a kid-genius who invented automatically-orienting solar panels before he was sixteen and then sold his intellectual property for a ton of cash. Not sure if my revelation about parallel parking was obvious, I asked him if he knew why it works better to back into a parallel parking spot. He didn’t, so I proceeded with my now practiced presentation. After discovering that even Tom didn’t know, I then revealed that I was considering writing an article about it.
