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It never ceases to amaze me how many people appear to have no idea how wide their vehicle is.
Having parked outside my mothers’ house in a country lane, there were cars whose drivers crept through the gap at a snails pace, peering out of both sides even when already alongside my car, as if in some way their car was suddenly going to get wider as it breathed out. The same day, the local recycling lorry came up the road and drove past without issue.
The recycling lorry was at a guess about 8 feet wide, and the car about 6 feet. So why with an extra 2 feet of space did the car drivers struggle so much?
Modern tractors are also about 8 feet wide and that’s without the machinery they are often towing or carrying that can be much wider. I’ve had these pass my parked car without issue too.
I understand that lorries are usually driven by professional drivers, and tractors by farmers who spend a great deal of time in them. But, most people keep their cars for several years, and as such, one might think would get to know the size of it intimately.
So, is it just down to the fact that most drivers are just average at judging the size of their car or could it be that as cars have got safer, the drivers are now protected by more metal that gets in the way of their ability to see the extremities of their car?
I suspect it’s actually more about the latter. Drivers are often sitting higher up in modern cars too, and this also has an effect. I’ll show my age now by quoting from the old TV comedy show “Not the 9 O’clock News”, they used the made-up word Camberchondria to describe the feeling one gets while sitting on the top deck of a double-decker bus that the bus is too wide for the road.
This can happen even in cars with low seats and high doors. The angle that the driver can see makes the vehicle seem wider and longer than it is.
Have you ever watched drivers trying to negotiate bollards put into roads to make a narrow area to slow traffic down? They are usually wide enough apart for lorries to get through too, but you’d be amazed how many people in cars still hit them.
On holiday in Devon recently, I also found it incredibly frustrating meeting drivers in lanes who evidently had no idea how to pass cars coming from the opposite direction. They seem to want to stop in the narrowest parts of the road, rather than looking for the widest area and judging their speed, and mine, so that we meet in that wide area. I assume, usually incorrectly that this is what most people do and wonder what goes through the heads of those who just stop wherever they are, and then expect others to somehow create space to pass.
Next time you have a moment and you are in a carpark with marked spaces, why not play a little game of trying to pull up right next to first one line and then the other. It’s more difficult than you might think, especially on the nearside or passenger side.
I’m not suggesting for one minute that we should all be racing past parked cars with inches to spare, but being able to confidently judge the size of your vehicle is a skill we should all be better at, not least because modern cars have got wider by an average of 16% over older cars, but the spaces we try to park in at supermarkets and such, have remained the same or indeed got narrower as they try to cram more cars in.