BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

Interpreting what constitutes a parking space seems to be a challenge to a lot of people.  So, to help all those parking-challenged individuals, here’s a short course on how to figure out where you’re supposed to park.

When you drive into a parking lot, look for painted lines on the ground.  You’ll  notice that there are whole bunches of them.  If you’re lucky, each line will actually be double lines painted very close together.  That means that the management of that lot are nice people who will give you a bit of extra room to get out of your car after you park it.

In any event, the idea is to park your car in the exact center between two of those lines, whether they’re single or double lines.  Now, we all know that getting your car into the exact center of the lines is going to be difficult.  You just need to practice until you can get it pretty close.

Keep in mind that if you park too close to one of the lines - or heaven forbid, if your tires end up on top of or over the line - you have effectively made the space beside you unusable by anyone else until you leave.

Which I hope you do pretty fast.

OK, so one of my pet peeves is people who don’t know how to park their cars so that the rest of us get to use the parking lot, too.  And, you can probably guess that I was in a crowded parking lot recently where the only parking spot within a half mile of my destination was rendered useless by one of the “line parkers” among us.

I think learning to park between the lines, and caring enough to do so on a regular basis, is just not that difficult.  Now, parallel parking - that’s a different story.

I hate parallel parking.  So, it was a challenge when I lived in downtown Baltimore at one time in my life.  Downtown Baltimore is a great place to live.  It’s one of the truly alive big-city downtown areas. 

The only problem is that most of the real estate is made up of row houses.  When you live there, you have to park on the street.  Parallel park, that is.  And while that seems very normal to long-time residents, it’s a challenge for some of the rest of us.

As a brand new resident, I was chagrined when I arrived home one day and my neighbor was sitting on his front stoop, and the only place to park was directly behind his car.

Parking the car turned into an even larger event than usual because I was nervous.  But, after several trips back and forth, I finally fit the car in the spot, close enough to the curb, and without touching his vehicle.

As I walked to my door, I laughed about my horrible parallel parking skills.  My neighbor was silent for a moment, then said:

“Hmm… so the last place you lived had a driveway, huh?”