Transportation: Reverse-angle parking not quite as easy as 1-2-3

Article was published by the Austin American Statesman.
Reference: Back-in/Head-out Angle Parking PDF published January 2005.


Reverse-angle parking not quite as easy as 1-2-3
Ben Wear: Getting There
I decided, first of all, to leave at home the precious new Mazda3 I just purchased. No, for an initial attempt at an acrobatic move like back-in parking, best to call on my creaky old Taurus. I went to work Tuesday in the pre-scratched warhorse, which has 155,000 miles on it and soon will become my 16-year-old's starter car.
I decided to go first to East Dean Keeton Street, where the city two summers ago installed about 220 "reverse-angle" parking spaces on the University of Texas' northeast edge. I spotted a row that, with most of the students gone for summer, was basically empty of cars. I slowed down for what the City of Austin, on its cheery signs, says is an "easy as 1-2-3" maneuver. Signal, stop, reverse.
Why engage in this harrowing exercise? In case you missed it, the city is about to make a prominent addition to what has been a limited stable of these off-kilter parking slots. Aside from the spaces on Dean Keeton, there are 27 on West Sixth Street a couple of blocks west of North Lamar Boulevard. That's it, until this summer.  After a repaving project is finished next month on South Congress Avenue in the bustling shopping and dining strip between Riverside Drive and Oltorf Street, asphalt artists will paint in about 380 new reverse-angle spaces.
If you like Güero's, Allen's Boots, trailer cupcakes or weird costumes, well, you'll probably soon be learning the hard way to back into an angled space.
The point of all this, the city insists, is safety for drivers — and cyclists, but more on that later. A person parked in a back-in space can see clearly to the left when it's time to leave. And the driver exits forward, rather in reverse, which is easier. And backing into an angled space, city officials argue, is easier than parallel parking.
City officials point to 24 accidents over the past five years on South Congress that involved parking (4.8 a year, not exactly a pandemic of parking pandemonium). And they say only one parking accident has occurred on Dean Keeton since the reverse angle spaces went in. Of course, fender-denter accidents aren't always reported, sometimes not even to the absent owner of the victimized car.

City officials say, also, that reverse-angle parking is much safer for passing cyclists in bike lanes installed between the traffic lanes and the angled spaces. Bike lanes run along West Sixth and Dean Keeton. After the repaving, a bike lane will be drawn on the southbound side of South Congress.

You didn't learn how to perform this parking maneuver in driver training, by the way, and neither will my daughter. I called Austin Driving School, which has eight Austin locations and 17 statewide. No, they don't teach back-in angle parking, the woman who answered the main phone line told me after doing some checking. They do teach the difficult art of parallel parking, however.
And Department of Public Safety driver's license examiners, although they do force applicants to prove they can parallel park, do not test them on reverse-angle parking, spokeswoman Tela Mange told me.
We're on our own.
I wasn't on my own, however, on Dean Keeton. As I slowed, a gray Lexus behind me had to jerk to a halt. Dang. Forgot Step 1: signal. The Lexus changed lanes and accelerated off in that tire-screeching way that usually means the driver is irritated.
I looked over my right shoulder — twisting to look backward at age 57 is not as easy as used to be — and began to back in.
First time in, I was badly off center, with far more space to the stripe on the car's left side than on the right. The second time, I ended up cock-eyed, with my right back wheel actually in the next space. This, it turns out, is a common flaw. Many of the cars on Dean Keeton and, I discovered later, on West Sixth had this back right tire problem.
On my third attempt — this time I took the chance of parking between two actual cars — I figured out that swiveling around after I began backing up and looking over my left shoulder helped. I ended up basically straight in and centered. But it felt weird.

Over on busy West Sixth Street, where the spots are opposite the Z'Tejas restaurant and a series of shops, it feels more than weird to some of the shoppers and storekeepers. It feels wrong.  One woman pulled her SUV in frontward.  "Is that not what I was supposed to do?" she said when informed of her mistake. "It's so confusing. I thought, ‘What in the world? Why would they do that?' I don't care for it."

The 10 spaces in the section near Wiggy's Liquor Store have remained mostly empty during afternoon rush hours since the reverse spaces were installed in August, said Wiggy's owner Tim Kutach. He estimates that his business is off 15 to 20 percent. "Right now, it's prime time for me," Kutach said late one afternoon last week. People seem to think of liquor after a hard day's work. "But rush hour has the most intense traffic, so people don't want to park here. Thank God I have the two spots on the side (on Blanco Street), or no one would come."

On a clipboard near the door, Kutach has a stack of petition forms calling for a purge of the reverse-angle spaces. It has more than 500 signatures on it, but Kutach no longer plans to turn it in to the city. He said he knows a done deal when he sees one.
If all this had been done with the commuting cyclists in mind, they haven't gotten the message. Between 5 and 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, seven bikes came by, or about one every 41/2 minutes. Cyclists headed west into Tarrytown, after all, have the nearby off-street alternatives of the Lance Armstrong Bikeway and the hike-and-bike trail. Meanwhile, car traffic averaged about 30 a minute, or one every two seconds.
Some people did pull up, tentatively, from time to time and reverse-angle park. Generally, they needed a couple of back-and-forths to get centered or nearly so. One woman almost hit the car to her right while backing in. She squeezed out of her driver door and made her way into a shop.
Laura Singleton, an interior designer from Tarrytown, came up in a black SUV for a visit to Shabby Slips furniture. Because of all the empty spaces, she cut across them and then did a little maneuvering into a space. It took her awhile.  "That is difficult!" she said after getting out. "I don't know why they did it."  I told her about the bike safety thing.  "How many bikers do you see going by?" she asked. We gazed up the crowded street at a slug of cars rushing toward us. The bike lane was empty. Singleton cocked an eyebrow. "My point exactly."
For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.

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