Q: What is proper etiquette when in a parking lot? Are there rules about how to handle other drivers and people walking to and from their cars?
A: With a few exceptions, traffic laws in Washington are written for road users on public highways. They mostly don’t apply to private property like a shopping mall parking lot or the field at your uncle’s house where you learned to drive a tractor. The exceptions include more serious traffic crimes like impaired driving. While most of the rules here apply only to public roadways (and their associated public parking spots) that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from the law about how to drive in a private parking lot. It’s just that what we take from the Revised Code of Washington will work more like a recommended best practice rather than something you’re legally obligated to do.
Did you know that it’s illegal to save a parking spot? If you’re traveling in a group and you arrive first, it’s not legal to hold a few spots for your friends. (I’m talking to you, people who used traffic cones and caution tape to block off five parking spots on Birch Bay Drive on July 4th.) If you’re a passenger it’s not lawful to hop out of the car and stand in a parking spot you spotted on the other side of the road while your driver friend circles around the block to snag it.
Are there speed limits in parking lots? On occasion I’ve seen speed limit signs in shopping mall parking lots, but those speed limits aren’t being enforced by local police. That doesn’t mean you can drive any speed you’d like. I mentioned earlier that traffic laws apply only to public roadways, with a few exceptions – here’s one of them: driving through a parking lot at a speed that any reasonable person would know is dangerous could get you arrested for reckless driving.
If there’s one thing you can bet on in a parking lot, it’s pedestrians. Nearly every person who drives into a parking lot becomes, moments later, a pedestrian. And unlike our public transportation infrastructure that has sidewalks and crosswalks to create some predictability about where you’ll likely encounter someone on foot, in a parking lot it could be anywhere. On public roads traffic engineers have two goals in roadway design: efficiency and safety. And when you chose a route for your drive, you’re probably making your decisions based on efficiency in the form of how long it’ll take to get to your destination. That’s fine, but once you get into a parking lot you have to think differently. The goal of a parking lot designer is to fit as many cars as possible into the available space. Parking lots are a place to store your car while to do what you came to do. That makes parking lots a place for a lot of pedestrian/vehicle interactions. Over the past couple years Washington law has added more language protecting pedestrians and making it clear that the person in control of the 4000 pound projectile has the greater responsibility in an encounter with a pedestrian.
I don’t know if anyone has ever done a study on miles traveled in forward compared to reverse by driving location, but I’ll guess that highest percentage of reverse driving happens in parking lots. Backing crashes account for around 300 fatalities a year. That might seem like a comparatively small number in the context of the roughly 36,000 traffic fatalities we had last year. But when we measure the distance we back up in feet and the distance we drive in miles it’s clear that per mile (or foot) traveled, backing up is a high-risk action. Unless you get lucky and find two parking spots nose to nose so you can pull all the way through, at some point when you park you’re going to have to back up. The law requires drivers backing out of a parking spot to yield to drivers and pedestrians already in the roadway.
Maybe the way to think about parking lot etiquette is to compare how we drive in the lot to how we push your grocery cart through the store. We wouldn’t disregard a child walking in front of us or cut in front of someone standing in the check-out line. If we’re willing to be polite in the store, let’s extend that same kindness and courtesy to the parking lot, regardless of whether any particular law can be enforced on private property.