Where, when, and how well people park: a phone survey and field measurements

Abstract

Two evaluations were completed to characterize where, how often, and how accurately people normally park. A telephone survey of 30 drivers examined where people park most frequently and the problems drivers have parking. The focus was on executing maneuvers, not the availability of parking. Depending on how the question was asked, approximately 74 to 84 percent of the parking events involved perpendicular parking. Of the 8 parking-related crashes reported by subjects, 6 involved backing, usually with a vehicle traveling down an aisle or backing up from a parking stall. A field survey examined the parking accuracy of 102 vehicles in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a college town. For parallel parking, drivers parked about 4 in from the curb in spaces averaging 24 feet long. For angle parking, distances to the front of the space were bimodal, with some drivers parking about 10 inches from the end of the space and others overlapping by 10 in on average. Overall, drivers parked slightly to the right of center (by 1 inch for parallel parking and 4 inches for perpendicular parking) for 8.5 feet wide spaces. Yaw angles were almost always less than 1 degree for perpendicular and angle parking, but as much as 3 degrees for parallel parking, which is a more difficult task. The data from this experiment provide both a basis for establishing the conditions for parking experiments and baseline data on how well people park without assistance.