Our grandchildren will not know how to parallel park. Heck, they may not know how to drive. I don't know why I find this bittersweet, but not my complete inability to churn butter.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
I'm 23, and I can't parallel park unless the spaces are especially giant or an adjacent one is open.
What can I say? I'm from Texas; we have parking lots.
parrallel parking wasn't on the virginia driver's test (and therefore wasn't a major focus in driver's ed) waayy waaay back in 1990, so its not just our (potential) granchildren who don't know how to parallel park
I get plenty of practice parallel parking while driving on I-270.
I hardly know how to parallel park.. I did it once just barely good enough to pass the driving test and that was it for years..
Now after having been around Ann Arbor (gag) for a while now, I've gotten better at it, but it can still take me four or five tries on a bad day. I wouldn't last a second driving in a real big city.
But yeah, maybe in a hundred years people will be riding horses for transportation again. Makes me glad to be a member of what is probably the last generation before the energy crisis really hits hard.
Why won't they know how to parallel park?
Like Amber, I'm not great at it because I learned to drive in the suburbs where parking lots predominated. But parallel parking is still required in downtown areas virtually everywhere and there has been a trend toward revitalizing those areas, and thus attracting more traffic, in recent years.
I am 20. I cannot parallel park. I can, however, knit, sew, churn butter, bake, and wash things by hand.
I'm set for a post-apocalyptic wasteland that looks suspiciously like a Laura Ingalls Wilder book.
Most people today, outside of larger cities, can't parallel park. Being genetically male, I pride myself in being able to park in spaces 3-6 inches larger than my car. It will truly be a lost art. Perhaps they'll have parallel parking reenactments at the Renaissance Faires for spectators to experience the quaint customs of past time.
Didn't you hear that double parking will be the new "must pass" requirement?
I'm 39 and I am also lousy at parallel parking, (I can do it but it takes me about 10 times as long as it should). I've always lived in the suburbs, and rarely drive in to the city. There is almost never any need for me to parallel park so I don't get any practice.
People laugh when I tell them this, but I am confident that within my lifetime, cars will drive themselves. It's too bad gas will be too expensive to truly enjoy the benfits of plotting your destination into the onborad computer and then reading a book or surfing the internet while your car merrily drives along.
minturn - I could see that happening, at least on major highways. I think it will be a long time comming on side streets. Laying out positioning and control equipment on all streets would cost to much, and I don't think that robotic car controls will have advanced enough in my lifetime to be an acceptable alternative without assistance from such equipment on, under, or next to the road.
I don't do much of it anymore, but I am very efficient at parallel parking. I had an excellent driving teacher in HS, who, incidentally, taught us all how to drive a car backwards with great skill.
However, I have watched many others parallel park, or try to, with much amusement over the years.
well crap, there's another Geoff here. This could get confusing.
Anyway, I'm curious what prompted the remark. Megan, are you thinking people won't be driving? Or that there will be parking lots everywhere? Or that all cars will do the fancy self-parallel-parking thing, or what?
If I had to guess, I'd say 50 years from now everyone will still be driving cars, albeit more fuel-efficient or purely electric ones. The only thing I can think of that would change the parking situation is that the dense cities which require street parking (NYC, Chicago, etc) will get so crowded and expensive that the only people who can afford to drive there won't be parking their own cars...
I don't understand this. I'm not even 18 and I can (sort of) parallel park. Why will parking spaces on the side of the street vanish in my children's/grandchildren's time? (Unless we get rid of cars, of course.)
Beyond the questions about technical possibility, automated driving would be a great question for Megan McArdle to probe here (hint, hint). Specifically, I have in mind this argument someone made on Slashdot:
Basically, the governmnet provides the roads as a public good for the purpose of getting people from (as Megan McArdle likes to put it) Point A to Point B, safely and efficiently. The "thrill" of driving is not part of this. Thefore, if automated driving is safer and more efficient, government should mandate it.
***
FWIW, I think the technical barriers are the least of our concerns. There are already many successful, working models. The main barriers are legal: specifically, that since a large corporation is now partly responsible for your driving, juries will have no qualms about smacking you with obscenely excessive verdicts, making insurance for them infeasible.
Remember: you can insure $1 trillion. You *cannot* insure "How much you got?"
Geoff,
Looking at the trends in car tech, we already have self-parallel-parkings cars. The Urban Challenge proved we can wire cars up to obey street signs, manage traffic with humans, park in various conditions (lots, streets), and not kill people in cross walks.
Assuming tech power improves, costs come down, in 5-10 years most cars will come with parking assistance for parallel, and luxury cars will be able to lot park automatically.
For highway driving, we already have speed adjusting cruise control to match traffic in front of you which in some cars can completely stop your vehicle without human intervention, lane detection to prevent drifting, 360 degree imaging for blindspot detection, and GPS. Integrating all of these systems could make automatic highway travel pretty reasonable. Add a dead man switch to ensure the driver is alert like on trains, and I think it looks fairly safe.
It is an exciting time, and coupled with the auto X-prize, we should have much more fuel efficient cars by 2015 or sooner. Having a car that gets triple digit mileage per gallon, that can mostly drive itself, seems like a very real possibility by mid century.
Are we going to be more suburbanized and less urban in the future, or the other way around? If you think (as I do) that we're likely to get a little bit more urban, albeit not a lot, it would seem that parallel parking is due for a rebound.
The trick, incidentally: start turning the wheel to back in when the edge of your back door is about even with the back bumper of the car ahead of that space.
Nah! The secret is to ram the car behind you until it makes enough room for you, then turn in.
Don't sell yourself short. Actually, I bet you are able to churn butter. Just buy an electric counter-top butter churn (what is the web for, if not to find things like this?), pour in cream, plug in. Simple, no? Doesn't even require coordination. ;-)
The idea of the self-driving car reminds me of a sci-fi story I read as a kid. In it, a couple gassing up at an automatic fuel station catch a glimpse of the prototype automatic car which is still on the road driving around and fueling itself up several years after having been launched. And still trapped inside is the rotting corpse of the first person to travel by automatic car.
Anybody ever read that one? I can't remember enough about it to get google to find it for me.
Don't sell yourself short. Actually, I bet you are able to churn butter.
Anyone can. Just put a half pint of heavy whipping cream into a small, reliably sealing container and shake like mad. Right about the time your arm is ready to fall off, it turns into whipped cream. Keep shaking for a couple more minutes, and it will start making a chunk chunk sound and appear to have seperated. At that point, you have buttermilk and a ball of butter about the size of a small ice cream scoop. Drink the buttermilk, lightly salt the butter ball, and serve.
Oh, right, the topic. It's easy to be spoiled about parallel parking if, like me, you have or had a small car with a tight turning radius and plenty of rear visibility. Larger cars, and especially newer cars with high rear ends, are much more difficult because you have to know by intuition where the actual corners of the vehicle are located.
Anybody ever read that one? I can't remember enough about it to get google to find it for me.
Hey, what do you know...I did read that one. But I cannot remember where. It might have been in some old book of collected 1950/60s short story fiction that I had lying around when I was a kid, probably rescued from a library book sale. I can't think of any other place I might have encountered it.
Parallel parking is actually pretty simple. You just have to know how close to be, when to start to turn, to what angle, and when to start to turn back. Just 4 things to know.
I was thinking about the technological requirements of developing self-driving, fuel efficient cars. My thought is that cars are inherently resource-intensive. Even if you get the milage to 80mpg or whatever, the resources needed to BUILD the darn thing will be pretty large. For everyone to have one (the US model) will still be a huge drain on resources.
Why not apply the same technological power to improving mass transit? Figure out where the resource choke points are, and work around them? It would be far easier to make mass transit more convenient than make cars an efficient means of transportation.
Mark,
Look at Montana, now tell me how to make mass transit work there in a way that is less intensive than cars and driving.
Now allow me to get from any city in MT to any city in IA...
Bob,
I think I read that story in the LA Times last week.
For everyone to have one (the US model) will still be a huge drain on resources.
By the time everyone has one, we'll be talking about improving fuel mileage (parsecage?) on the personal spaceships.
Important thing to realize is: this is a good problem to have.
Parallel parking is actually pretty simple. You just have to know how close to be, when to start to turn, to what angle, and when to start to turn back. Just 4 things to know.
This is roughly like saying that meringue or angelfood cake are "actually pretty simple" because there are only four basic ingredients. While technically true, the difference between successful execution and utter disaster lies in fractional mistakes.
"Look at Montana, now tell me how to make mass transit work there in a way that is less intensive than cars and driving."
March 27, 2008 2:25 PM
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?gmd:4:./temp/~ammem_9ryU::
http://www.employees.org/~davison/nprha/first.html
when GSEs did something useful..
I was raised on a farm that, when I was a child, did not have electricity or running water. I worked one summer repairing railroad track in a scrapyard, using hand tools made by the Gandy Mfg. Co. So I have a lot of skills and knowledge that haven't been useful in decades and I pray never will be again.
And as I reflect on all the outhouse-, goat wrangling-, chicken plucking-, oil lamp- and sledgehammer-related skills that have been lost, I have one thing to say to all of you who never had them. You didn't miss a damn thing.
MEH,
I realize railroads exist, and can connect points across wide expanses. It cannot provide all city to all city transportation, especially in the west, in anything resembling the efficiency of cars, even including construction and road maintenance.
I use mass transit all the time, I commute on it, I go out on it, I take it to the airport. I'm a supporter of it, but I won't give up my car because:
1) Sometimes I need to carry large objects
2) Some points of the city are literally multiple miles from the train
3) The train is expensive and slow, and I don't see either of those improving
4) I know people who live outside the city, and would like to visit them
5) I know people who live in other states, but not near airports
"Our grandchildren will not know how to parallel park. Heck, they may not know how to drive."
One can only hope for that. Individual automobiles have caused massive death, pollution, and eased the way for irresponsible sex. (Having anonymous sex on a horse is generally difficult. Even on a train there's plenty of chances for interruption) I never bothered to learn to drive at all. Good riddance to them.
Thomas R: You don't use horses for that---that's what haylofts are for.
I'm 39, but I didn't really learn to parallel park until I started working in the downtown area of a medium-sized city ten years ago. Same reason as most other folks here give...if you don't have a reason to practice, you don't pick up the skill. My Manhattan-raised mother-in-law could parallel park in spaces that were physically smaller than her car.
I think this sort of thing is nicest when it's optional. I recently bought a 1920 handcrank Singer sewing machine, which I am inordinately fond of: sturdy, silent, very precise, equipped with an astonishing array of clever gadgets. I use it for pleasure, so I can blissfully ignore its slow speed and tendency to tire the arm with more than an hour of steady sewing. As Bob Hawkins implies, it'd be a lot less fun if I was relying on that machine to feed my kids. In the same vein, I can parallel park, but it's much easier to use a parking space, and I'd hate to have to parallel park on congested streets every damn day.
Oh, and Megan: You have a KitchenAid, right? Grab a pint of whipping cream and your paddle attachment, and let 'er rip at fairly high speed. You should have butter within five minutes.