Opinion : Can you tell a bad driver from how they park their car?

Trundling around the roads of Wycombe in my trusty historic motor car my good self has seen some amazing examples of bad driving.

I’ve seen it all from drivers who mount the kerb and drive on the pavement because they can’t be bothered to wait in a queue of traffic at a junction to those who think they can nip though a set of traffics lights when they have just turned red.

Indeed my good self has become quite an expert at spotting a driver not fully in control of their vehicle or those who seem oblivious to the rules in the highway code.

Many examples of poor driving can be seen in the car parks of the town.

It should be easy enough to park the car after all there are two thick white lines each side of the parking space to line your vehicle up with. However for some just getting the car parallel to the white lines is too much to ask.

How many times have you walked through a car park and seen vehicles parked skew-whiff in a parking space?

Then there are those who park their car more towards one side of a parking space than the other, leaving more space on the side of the vehicle where they, the driver, needs to get out.

With their vehicle pulled to the left most extremity of the parking space what about the poor person who parks to the left of their vehicle? There won’t be much room for that driver to alight from their vehicle.

Back in the 1990’s the powers that be introduced ASBO’s (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders), well yours truly would like to see ASPO’s brought in too, namely Anti-Social Parking Orders.

At the moment it seems that so long as the four wheels of a vehicle are within the confines of the while lines marking out the parking space then everything is tickety-boo.

It doesn’t matter if the vehicle is parked too far to one side or the parking space or if the vehicle is left in the space at an angle.

I would also like to see the authorities start patrols of the towns car parks to carry out inspection of the vehicles parked there.

It’s amazing how often my good self has seen a vehicle parked in a car park with bald tyres, obviously dodgy windscreen wipers or other blatant MOT failing faults.

Let’s see ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) technology installed in every major car park, not for the purposes of charging the driver to park their car, but to check every vehicle entering to see if it has a road tax, MOT and is insured.

It’s ever so easy to spot a bad driver, you only need to see their capability when it comes to parking their vehicle in a car park.

Does parking a vehicle in a multi-storey car park form part of the driving test? I think not. It definitely should be.

What do you think?

*My blogs are published every Tuesday and Friday evening around 8.00pm here on the WycombeToday.com website.

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