Reverse parking is the only way – and I can back it up

Now look, I’m not the sort of person to routinely disparage the mainstream media, because I suppose basically I’m part of it.

I’m not a ‘wake up, sheeple’ conspiracy theorist who thinks that the MSM is somehow out to dupe you, increasingly popular grift though that is these days.

More than that, I’m deeply suspicious of people who begin sentences with “I am not a…” and who follow it with “…but”, because what happens between those two clauses is very often disturbingly revealing about what they actually think.

And yet with those caveats made, here goes: I’m not a conspiracy theorist who thinks the mainstream media is out to dupe you, but recently two national newspaper columnists raised an issue that has made me truly doubt their seriousness.

I am, of course, talking about parking in a bay. I didn’t think I had particularly strongly held views on this matter.

I usually, albeit not exclusively, reverse into a perpendicular parking space. Always have done. Likely always will. I find it easier to back into a bay, and for sure it’s easier to drive out of it afterwards.

That’s about the start and end of things. I do this, forget about it and bear no particular ill will towards those who prefer to park nose inwards; I just silently think they’re absolute savages, obviously, particularly if it’s taking them ages and I’m waiting to go past.

I thought most people, deep down, knew that reversing into a space was the objectively better thing to do, with the only downside – and I will admit that it’s a genuine one – being that it can leave it difficult to access your car’s boot if it’s backed against a wall.

But if you don’t need to stack shopping from trolley to boot, parking rear end first wins, hands down.

Anyway, while clearly not everybody parked like I did, I wasn’t going to start banging on about it: in nearly 12 years of writing this column, I haven’t mentioned it once. But when they actively came for the reverse parkers, I had to speak out.

Twice in the past six months (and I won’t name the columnists or the papers concerned because, honestly, I can’t be bothered with somebody tagging us all on social media), I’ve read mainstream journalists – not car enthusiasts, nor clearly ones with any notable grasp of physics – assert that reverse parkers are actively wrong; that nose-in parking is the superior, more sensible, even the more noble and less selfish thing to do.

That it’s objectively ‘better’, less time-consuming, less bothersome.

Ugh. If we must, let’s begin the process formally known as debunking. The reason it’s better to perpendicularly reverse into a bay is the same reason that steered wheels are at the rear of forklift and pallet trucks: it allows for much greater accuracy in positioning the pointy end.

The same principle applies if you try to parallel park forwards in a tight space: there’s a bigger chance that the front wheels will swing wildly into the kerb than if you go in backwards.

There’s more: when you’re nosing into a space, the bay’s lines are usually quickly obscured by the bonnet.

When you’re reversing, they’re reflected in your wing mirrors, so you can keep the car centred easily.

Then you get a much clearer, safer view when you want to exit, in one clean, easy manoeuvre, rather than that infuriating shuffle between two rows of tightly packed cars, as some doddery Vauxhall Mokka will be doing in the multi-storey opposite the office as I write this.

Physically and objectively, reverse parking is better. I don’t care if you don’t do it, but for heaven’s sake, MSM, don’t come at us pretending that it isn’t.