Q: Lately I’ve seen a lot of motorcycles parking in the hashed area adjacent to posted handicapped parking spaces. I’ve always understood that the hashed area was part of the handicapped parking space to allow room for persons getting into and out of vehicles. Is parking in the hashed area a handicapped parking violation or just rude?
A: It’s not just rude (I mean, it is rude, but not just that.) The law states that it’s an infraction to “stop, stand, or park in, block, or otherwise make inaccessible the access aisle located next to a space reserved for persons with physical disabilities.” Maybe the motorcyclists thought they found a loophole. They didn’t. But even if they had, a loophole is often the term for justifying poor behavior to gain an advantage.
Compelling a person with mobility challenges to navigate around your motorcycle isn’t an example of beating the system; it’s an example of being a nincompoop (and I’m not generally one to use harsh language) to a person who was supposed to be supported by the system. All for a parking spot.
Why are so many people obsessed with getting a “good” parking spot? And I put good in quotes because I think we’ve got the metrics wrong. Or more accurately, we’re basing what’s good on only one metric: how close the parking spot is to the door we intend to enter.
If you have mobility challenges, proximity to your destination ranks high when finding a parking spot. For everyone else, the parking spot closest to the entrance is often not the best one. Presumably, people want those close parking spots because it makes their walk quicker. But it’s also the area with more congestion, increased potential for fender-benders, and a generally worse mental and emotional experience.
Park further away and you might find that you can pull through one stall and into the next so that when it’s time to leave you don’t have to back out of a parking stall. According to AAA, 91 percent of parking lot collisions involve backing up.
Further out, you’re more likely to find a parking spot with an empty stall next to you. That makes getting out of and into your car easier and is a clear advantage if you need to load anything through your car doors, especially if it’s too big to fit in the trunk.
Parking close doesn’t guarantee any time savings. Maybe you’ve had the experience of seeing a car waiting for a supposedly good parking spot. Meanwhile, you park a few stalls further away without a wait and end up walking into the store while the other driver is finally pulling into their stall.
How much time does it cost you to park a bit further out? A standard parking stall ranges from eight-and-a-half to nine feet wide. Humans have a range of walking speeds so your actual time will vary, but using four feet per second (the speed traffic engineers often use when calculating pedestrian travel times), parking five stalls further out would add eleven seconds to your walk to the store.
Once you’re willing to trade eleven seconds for less parking hassle, you can apply that to driving too. Letting someone merge in front of you will take about three seconds. Waiting for a safe time to pass a cyclist might be ten or fifteen seconds. A small price for becoming a better human.
Returning back where we started, to any motorcyclists tempted to park in the aisle for disabled parking, it’s not legal, and you might get called a nincompoop in the newspaper.