As many of you know, I live in an apartment building. I park my car in an assigned spot in the parkade. My spot is next to a concrete pillar. Someone else parks their car on the other side of me. The spot next to them has been empty. It’s been empty since before my parking neighbour lived here. In the over ten years I’ve lived in my building, no one else has ever parked a car in the spot adjacent to my parking neighbour. I have illustrated the situation in the above diagram, which is a top-down view. The black rectangles are concrete pillars, the yellow lines are the parking lines, and the black outlines are our cars.
Now the thing you have to understand is the spots in our building are not very wide. They border on being too skinny for modern cars. As such, it’s a tight fit, even for your economy cars. I didn’t draw it really well but that concrete pillar to my left is essentially right up against the left yellow parking line. I don’t have a lot of leeway to my left. So I try to park right in the middle of my spot. I try to give myself enough room to the left to avoid scraping my driver side mirror on the pillar, while not being too close to my neighbour’s car on the right.
The maddening thing is that my parking spot neighbour insists on also parking right down the middle of their spot. Why? It’s illogical. There’s no one to their right. He or she has room to park their car slightly to the right in their spot. That would leave several inches more room for them to get into their car. Instead, I can only imagine how difficult it must be to squeeze themselves between their car and mine, trying to open their car door without hitting my car.
I’ve seen other people in the parkade who take advantage of not having a car neighbour and parking their cars slightly offset in their spots so they have more room. This logic escapes my neighbour. I have never seen the person who parks the car next to me but I’m really tempted if I see them to ask why they insist on parking right down the middle of their spot. I can only imagine this person follows the rules all the time and gets nervous if they deviate even slightly from what is expected of them.