- By Dan Veaner
- Opinions
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The older I get, the grouchier I get about governments and how they think and act. If they can make something more complicated or costly they always think that is better. My strategy is to stay away from government programs as much as possible, because they want too much control. If what they want you to do made sense it would be one thing. But you go through hoops, fill out forms, do the opposite of what you set out to do, all to comply with some politician's disconnected idea of how tilted the world should be. After you have spent more and more time and effort and stress complying with whatever it happens to be, how is your life actually better?Take parallel parking. How much time per week do you spend parallel parking? And how much time do you spend doing other kinds of driving, like going forward, backing up and stopping? How many people are killed going one mile an hour in a space a little bigger than the car itself? Yet how much weight is put on parallel parking in New York's road test?
Sure, you want to weed out bad drivers. And you want to take people off the road like the lady who drove through the glass storefront of the Lansing Post Office in 2008, or the one who drove through the glass foyer at Lansing Market the day before it first opened. But -- News Flash! -- those people were driving forward. They weren't parallel parking. Evidently the first woman thought her car was in reverse, and the second one's foot slipped or something along those lines. Nobody ever turned a Lansing store into a drive-through because of bad parallel parking.
I once knew someone whose car would only go forward. They took great pains to only park where they could exit going forward. Again, a government function, parking space design could be better than just linking cars up along a sidewalk. It's not like we don't have the brains to figure out this not-rocket-science strategy. Well, maybe it is... Yeah, that person had to get reverse fixed before the next inspection, probably a good idea.
Have you ever been to downtown Greene? You park at an angle to the sidewalk, driving straight in to an available space. My friend with no reverse couldn't have gotten out, but the plan there makes much more sense, and fits more cars. Sure the road has to be wider, but, really, doesn't that make sense?
I have also read of cars that park themselves. You pull up next to an empty space and the car goes sideways until it is next to the curb. That must be handy for the folks who can afford it, but isn't it going a little too far to solve an easy problem?
In fiscal 2014, 47 percent of the 154,526 people who took the driving test in Maryland failed. The year before that statistics showed that more than half of all New Yorkers who took the road test failed. That is not to say that a large percentage of these wannabe drivers weren't just terrible at it. But think about this: of the 30 points allowed before you fail New York's driving test, parallel parking accounts for half. So if you happen to get 30 points off, and 15 of them are for parallel parking, that means you are twice as good a driver as someone who scored 30 points for other aspects of the test. Because parallel parking just isn't a big part of driving.
Look at accident statistics in New York State for 2014, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. 1,039 traffic fatalities. 11,956 serious injuries. 2334 alcohol-impaired driving fatalities. 332 fatalities related to speeding. In 2013 (again the last year for which these statistics are available at the moment) 0.92 million traffic fatalities per VMT (vehicle miles traveled). And these statistics are just for fatalities.
My point? Of the fewer than 50% of people passing the New York who pass the driving test, some of them are really terrible drivers. I can't find any statistics anywhere on parallel parking accidents or fatalities. The closest I could find was a Youtube video of a really really bad parallel parking fail in Scotland.
Last year Maryland recognized this silliness. Their DMV took parallel parking out of its driving test, which added Maryland to a growing number of states that do not test parallel parking skills, including Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois,
New York should take a parallel course and join them.
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