I was in Kamloops last week, and as often happens on visits there I reflected on what the answer would be to the question “What’s the worst parking lot in Kamloops?”
It’s a trick question, since there’s really no wrong answer: almost every parking lot in Kamloops could, it seems, lay claim to the sorry title of “worst”. They all seem to have been designed by people who have no background in engineering or planning, little if any grasp of traffic flow, and who may have never actually driven a car, with the resulting parking lots full of rows that you enter or exit at impossible angles, or which don’t seem to lead anywhere, or which end at blind intersections where it’s not clear who has the right-of-way. As for pedestrians? It’s every woman for herself.
I think, on balance, that the north side of the parking lot near Save-on-Foods at Columbia Square is the winner (or loser) in any “worst parking lot” contest, with its myriad rows and lanes that have no discernible beginning or end, and cars trying to enter or exit Summit Drive, and pedestrians darting in and out like minnows in a stream. Honourable mention goes to the parking lot at Chapters, and the hair-raising merge site below it where traffic coming to or from Chapters has to contend with traffic from the parking lot at Aberdeen Mall at what is essentially a blind junction where you take a breath, mutter a prayer, step on the gas, and hope for the best.
Children do this so much better. Give a child a piece of paper and a crayon and ask them to draw a parking lot, and you’ll get something full of straight rows running parallel to each other, not a bunch of crazily-angled lines that look as if someone had dropped a bunch of toothpicks on a table and was trying to draw the resulting mess. That’s because children are ruthlessly logical, as many a parent has found to their cost, and will almost always opt for the simplest and most straightforward answer.
However, parking lot designers aren’t solely to blame for the chaos. Many lots were designed at a time when vehicles were, on average, much smaller than they are today, with parking stalls sized acccordingly. Put your hand up if you’ve ever sat in a parking lot, unable to move because someone was trying to manoeuvre a pickup truck or SUV the size of a small tank into a stall approximately 2.73 inches wider than their vehicle, or nearly been hit because you couldn’t see around a truck whose back end protruded from the stall by several feet.
And then there are the drivers who seem to think that niceties such as using turn signals don’t apply in parking lots. I’m sorry, Mr. Ford F-150 in the Save-on parking lot whom I almost rear-ended; I didn’t know that you were about to suddenly slow down and make a left turn down a row of parking stalls, because you didn’t use your turn signal to indicate your intentions, and I’m not a mind-reader. I’m sure you’re not either, which is just as well, because the words going through my mind at that moment are not ones I can print in this newspaper.
(A word, if I may, for those who abandon their shopping carts at their parking stall for others to bump into: don’t. If you are physically capable of pushing your cart around a store the size of an aircraft hangar and then wheeling it out to your car, you are physically capable of walking it 40 feet to one of the spots that the store has thoughtfully designated as a drop-off point.)
There’s a lot to be said for online shopping, good and bad, but the lack of parking lots when you’re shopping at Amazon is a decided plus, in my book. At least I won’t be dealing with maze-like lots, inconsiderate drivers, and pedestrians with a death wish. Plus there isn’t an abandoned shopping cart in sight.