Parking techniques for beginners

By Stuart Johnston 

Parking a car successfully is a technique that is one of the most difficult to master of all driving operations. Here are a few tips to get you into the swing of things!

The first step when learning to park a car successfully is to become acquainted with the extremities of the car you will be driving. Even experienced drivers sometimes battle to park a car that they unfamiliar with.

The reason for this difficulty often lies in the body shapes of many modern cars. Unlike older cars, which had squared-off shapes that enabled you to see the edges of the bonnet and the rear boot area of a car easily, modern cars with aero shapes often have bonnet lines that slope steeply away. The nose sections of modern cars can also extend far beyond where you would expect them to end.

And in addition to all this, the roof pillars of cars are often quite thick, for safety reasons, making visibility out the screen difficult in some areas, as well as views to the rear.

Enlist a friend to establish the outer edges of your car

An easy way to get an idea of where the edges of a car lie is to get a friend to stand up against each corner of the car, while you are behind the wheel with the car in a static (motionless) position. Get the friend to move  from the front left corner of the cart to the c entre of the car in front, and then to the right hand front end. This gives you an idea of where the bonnet and bumper, out of your line of vision, actually ends.

Keep a safe margin of the car’s edges in your mind’s eye

Once you have established this, always allow for a margin of a few centimetres in your mind’s eye, so that you don’t cut things too fine when attempting to squeeze your car into a tight parking space.

Then employ the same technique with your friend standing flush against the rear bumper of the car, form the corner, to the centre and then to the other corner. Establishing these three spots at each end is a good idea, as modern cars often have curved bumpers. If a tow bar is fitted to your car, allow an extra margin for this.

Check out how low the front bumper edge is

Another important point is to ascertain how low the front bumper is to the road surface. Many cars often receive damage to the lower edges of their bumper sections these days when people park in parking lots and drive their cars too close to the kerb, scraping the underside of the bumper and causing damage.

Adjust the mirrors

Adjust the mirrors  of the car to help you park more easily. For normal driving, the wing mirrors should be adjusted for your driving position to enable you to see just a small portion of the extremities of the car at the rear. The rest of the view in the mirror should be given over to the outward rear view to the left and right of the car.

Mirrors can provide distorted perspective regards distance, particularly the wing mirrors. Again, it is a good idea to get your friend to give you an idea of the rear distance that your mirrors show, regards the extremities of the car. Place the friend at each corner of the car at the rear, and also in the middle, and check with the image in the mirror so you can gauge how accurate that image is regarding where the actual perimeters of the car are.

When reverse or parallel parking you can angle the mirrors downwards to check out the kerb proximity.

Now to practise actual parking techniques...

You should learn the basic techniques of parking in an open sports field or empty parking lot, where there is no other traffic around. Early Sunday mornings are ideal for this.

To learn the basic techniques you should again enlist a friend or family member to help you.  You will need to take with you some sort of movable marking devices, such as plastic cones, to simulate a parking slot. If you don’t have these  you can use tennis balls or rocks or bricks. You will need to place these to simulate other cars and the edges of a kerb.

Parking in open parking lots

The easiest type of parking to do is where you drive a car straight I to a parking bay as you would in an open-air  supermarket parking lot. Here this will involve judging the end of your car so that you don’t nudge the defining kerb or wall of the slot, or another car parked ahead. The trick is to do everything slowly with small increments, as you place the car in the middle of the slot, and edge towards the forward perimeter, leaving a margin for safety at the edge of your car.

Get a feel for this a few times, with your assistant leaving you to judge where the imaginary edge is. Get out of the car regularly and see how close your judgement from behind the wheel was to the ideal placement that you should be aiming for.

Parallel parking is one of the most difficult driving techniques.

Even experienced drivers can battle with parallel parking. Often this has to be carried out in a stressful situation where the impatient driver of a car behind is putting pressure on you to get things done quickly. Rule one is: Don’t give in to this pressure.

To simulate this situation, place cones so that they simulate cars that will be in front and behind of your car when you have completed your parallel park. The situation you are simulating is where there is just one empty bay on a crowded street, and you have to get your car into that bay.

Draw up alongside the imaginary “car”

The correct method for parallel parking is to draw up quite close alongside the front car. Your car’s left front door  should be only a few centimetres away from the front parked car’s right front  door.

The second step to line your car up for the manoeuvre is at the edge of your car’s boot should be just a few centimetres to the rear of the front car’s rearward edge. Now you are ready to reverse into the spot.

Reversing into the slot

You select reverse gear. And as you slowly ease the car rearwards, you turn the steering wheel in an anticlockwise direction so that this edges the nose of your car out and the rear of your car in  towards the  kerb. You should continue reversing slowly with the nose now swinging outwards until the rear of the car is in the middle of the open parking bay, drawing close, but not too close to the kerb.

Swing the car in when your windscreen pillar is in line with the rear of the car in front

The windscreen pillar of your car should more or less be in line with the rear edge of the car in front. Now  you should begin steering the wheel clockwise to bring the nose of the car back in, the rear of the car outwards in line with the kerb. Slowly feed in power, keeping an  eye on the front left corner of your car, so that you can miss the imaginary ” car”  parked  in front, as you swing your car in line with the two parked cars.

Your friend should act as a substitute car park guard, who will guide you into the slot, telling you with hand signals which way to wind the steering wheel and weather to edge forward or stop because you have run out of space.

Measure real life parking bays before setting up your simulation

 A good idea before you even start all this is to measure real life parking bays you are likely to encounter by pacing them off, so that you can set up your imaginary bay accordingly.

Practise this a number of times until you get the technique right. Your mind and your body have a memory function, so the more times you do this in a stress-free environment, the more natural your “body language” will become when you have to do this “for real.”