The parallels of city parking

If I may say, and even if I may not, I'm rather good to this day at parallel parking. When you grow up with it, indeed when you've parallel parked cars without power steering (that could be a chore), you can get good at it. And in this day and age where turning radius is nothing less than remarkable, parallel parking should be easy.

So that's why it's so fascinating to me when I see area newbies struggling to parallel park their cars here in Woodbridge, where I live. You can just tell, you can smell it in the air, that they're used to driveways and parking lots where you simply pull into a space. I encountered a young woman creeping back and fourth four times this morning desperately trying to center her in a space which I guarantee you was plenty big enough to park. She even once pulled out and started over.

Woodbridge, developed between 1890-1910 mostly, lacks driveways. Being built up when cars were nowhere near on the horizon, houses are too close together to allow for driveways now. We do have alleys and some homes have garages, a luxury even us neighborhood old timers admit we were jealous of back in the day. Those lucky few had convenient places to park while the rest of us hunted up spots on the street. Be all that as it may, it still has me shaking my head at the issues others have with parking.