I’ve decided that periodically, I’m going to comment on something that our society has done with nothing but good intentions…but has nonetheless failed due to the human condition.
Today’s exciting edition: Compact Parking Spaces.
In Theory: it sounds like such a good idea. Well, some cars are smaller than others…and parking lots / structures can only be so big. If we have normal sized parking spaces, everybody can park….BUT if we make some parking spaces slightly smaller for the smaller cars…we can have more parking spaces, and more people can utilize our parking lot.
In Practice: people will park wherever they can in order to minimize their walking distance. The average person is lazy, and doesn’t particularly care about anything but themselves–…and making their lives easier. So in a world where the pick-up trucks, sport utility vehicles, mini vans, and other tank like automobiles; are reaching all time popularity. Any one of these vehicles is one mostly full parking lot away from barely cramming into a compact spot.
What’s the big deal? A parking spot is a parking spot, right? No! In this case, it’s actually not an entire parking space. While there may be enough room to safely work your Jeep Supreme Wrangler, into one of these compact parking spaces; using your doors comfortably is often a tight squeeze! But let’s go on…because it’s not just their own comfort that the non compact car compact parker is effecting. In order to fit their car comfortable away from the non compact car; the next car will need to be off center from the space ( do you see where we are going here?). The net take away is that several spaces are rendered non optimally used. It gets worse if there are multiple non compact cars in a row.
What can we do? It’s not even enough to dedicate yourself to parking in optimal spaces for your vehicle. No, no….we must just get rid of compact parking spots and deal with being able to park fewer cars in our lots.
At this point, it becomes a simple client / service problem. Cars become clients, parking lots provide the service. Like a web server servicing web requests; there are only so many clients it can service comfortably before it becomes overloaded and starts failing. Parking lots have similar thresholds….would you watch a streaming video; would you use a service if it provided a sub optimal experience? Like would you pay $5 to “rent” a movie on the internet, if the moving streamed so poorly that the experience of watching it was as bad as you could imagine? No! Of course not.
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