According to an estimate on floridalicenseplate.org there are 13.1 million cars and trucks in Florida, and according to me a majority of them are waiting for a parking space to open up. Literally and figuratively, it has taken years off my life—the endless searching and waiting and silent screams, requiring the patience of Job.
Long ago, I resigned myself to this parking purgatory as the price for never having to shovel snow. Then something happened to break my deal with the cosmos. It was like God looked down at Job and said, “You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet!”
Cue the age of back-in parking, elevating my pain level from abscessed tooth to covered in honey and fire ants. I have company. “For the love of all that is holy, stop backing into parking spaces!” begged an online sufferer.
Mark Hemingway, a writer for The Federalist magazine, was far beyond begging. “I have arrived at the conclusion that people who back into parking spaces are history’s greatest monsters,” vented Hemingway.
“I don’t want to overstate the problem,” the award-winning commentator claimed at the start of his 800-word indictment, which went on to do precisely that by drawing a tortured parallel between back-in parking and both the stock market and butterflies in the Congo. (Don’t ask.)
Hemingway did not, however, overstate the teeth-grinding exasperation of “being held up in a parking lot by someone backing into a space with all the speed and agility reserved for docking the U.S.S. Nimitz.” And he was also right about the root cause of amateur hour in parking lots:
“The reason large numbers of drivers got it into their heads they could back into spaces is not that they suddenly became better drivers. It’s because they started installing back-up cameras in every car.”
The first car with a back-up camera was the Buick Centurion, a “concept” car unveiled at a GM auto show in 1956. The concept never made it to market.
The first camera-equipped car for sale in the U.S. was the Infiniti Q45 in 2002, and by 2015 the technology was standard on many models. A federal regulation requiring cameras on all new cars sold in the U.S. took effect May 2, 2018, a date which will live in infamy for Hemingway.
The proliferation of back-in parking, he contended, has made “overall traffic worse in ways we can scarcely imagine.” Unless you’re getting signals through a tin foil hat.
I’m not at DEFCON 1 like Hemingway, but I second his emotion. Drivers who stop traffic to inch backward into a space belong in the same category of public nuisance as those who finish their business in the bank drive-through then sit there doing Wordle or reorganizing their purse. Still, I hit the streets to record the outrage of the inconvenienced and to ask uncaring backers why they do it.
I was expecting a guy like “Redneck Dave,” who wore a MAGA cap, exhibited a gnarly attitude and a monster pickup. He is a backer I found online who tops off his gas tank every night since “I might have to be 300 miles from here by mornin.’ Don’t want to have to stop for anything.”
I spoke with a dozen drivers evenly split between men and women, backers and none-backers. None of the backers struck me as one of history’s greatest monsters or related to Redneck Dave.
A snippy 50-ish woman who backed her Toyota Highlander into a primo space at Trader Joe’s said she does it because it’s “easier and safer,” giving me a “what a dumb question” look.
Everyone else, it seemed, had gotten into the edibles. A chill Bro in a baseball cap who parked straight in at Home Depot said backers don’t bother him much. “It depends on the day—how I got up.”
“They’re annoying,” said Juan, passing through the same lot. “But I’m a patient guy. If it’s a woman, I let it go.” Becky and Karla, cheery millennials, backed their SUV into a spot outside Shake Shack. “It’s a big topic in our friend group!” Becky said. “About half say, ‘I really get it.’ The others are like, ‘It’s really annoying.’ I can understand why it upsets people.”
Becky tries to be a considerate backer, showing me how she made sure her bumper didn’t jut over the curb where it could trip up people on the sidewalk. Karla is chagrined if her backing ever delays anyone: “I have a bumper sticker that says, ‘Please don’t honk at me—I’ll cry!’”
Also happy to talk was Michelle, 55, parked head-first at Whole Foods. “Yeah, it’s a pet peeve of mine. It’s just rude! A lot of times it’s an expensive car or giant truck. My daughter and I talk about it all the time. We see someone doing it and just trash them.”
Across the way, I asked ViVi, who struggled to park nose-first, about backers. “Funny you ask,” she said. “I found them very annoying, but that was before I got this—pointing to her new Nissan SUV with back-up technology. It opened her eyes.
“It seemed everyone was backing in,” she added. “They made it look easy and I decided to learn. Maybe I’ll be better doing it that way [than going straight in].” Lest you fear yet another hapless backer at-large, ViVi is practicing at home in her driveway so as not to make matters worse.
This will be music to Gigi’s ears. A retired ER nurse married to a retired orthopedic surgeon, Gigi had backed her Honda CRV into a spot at Publix. Why?
“My son was run over when he was 22 months old,” she said, when a driver backing out of her driveway couldn’t see him playing on the sidewalk. He suffered a broken leg and nasty flesh wounds but grew up to run track in high school.
Ever since, Gigi has parked with small pets and children in mind—backing in so she can head straight out with a clear view of anything in her path. I bet she would even brake for Mark Hemingway.