May 5, 2016 3 min read

The DMV has a bee in its bonnet about parallel parking. Yes, that was a cliché I just used there, but so is the whole notion of wedging a car into a space along a curb.

I’ve been reading that it’s getting more difficult to pass the driving road test because of parallel parking. During a test, the driver can do everything right with stop signs, signaling, intersections, changing lanes and the rest of the safety parts – only to fail for tapping an orange cone with the back bumper during the parking part.

I’ve been asking around, and a number of my friends tell me they wouldn’t have passed the test had parallel parking been included. I know I wouldn’t have.

I’m thinking of this now because my work has taken me to city streets; all the parking spaces run parallel to curbs. Faced with the tricky maneuver of getting my smallish SUV into them, I’ve realized I’ve been driving for going on 40 years and have almost never had to parallel park.

Good thing, then, the car I drive has a camera on the back, allowing me to avoid smacking the car behind me. Still, that leaves the front end which, when left to its own devices during the backing up, can do plenty of damage on its own.

Soon enough we will have self-parking cars whose tires go sideways to slide right into spots, a technological development that may make the parallel parking part of the driver’s test obsolete.

Until then, here’s what the DMV should be testing for instead of parallel parking:

• They should hook the drivers up to a polygraph machine and ask if they ever plan to text while driving. Have you looked into other cars lately? Everybody is texting – and not just teenagers. I don’t think anybody gets killed by a bad parallel parking job, something that can’t be said about texting and other distracted drivers.

• They should test drivers for their ability to go at least the speed limit or higher. Ditto those who go slowly in the passing lane.

• They should test drivers on their ability to remain calm and not get out of the car and pummel the jerk who is honking the horn while the driver is trying to get into the parallel space.

That’s the thing I hate most about parallel parking – the honking jerk. After all this time, I’m still not confident enough to slide my car into a space more or less the size of my car. I prefer the coward’s approach to the parallel space: drive around the block eight times until I find a space twice the length of my car. And then pull in forward.

All this talk of parallel space reminds me of a book I tried to read. Lisa Randall is an astrophysicist who is working to unlock the secrets of the universe. In “Warped Passages,” I think she was saying that because of gravity, there is a parallel world right next to us. To oversimplify, it’s as if there’s another Beth sitting right next to me in this parallel dimension.

I say let that Beth do the parallel parking. Me, I’m going to look for a parking lot where I can pull my car in front-end first. I’m very good at that.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.