Thursday, July 17, 2008

Should I Stay or Should I Tow?

I'll refrain from getting into the whole story for the moment and put out another opinion poll:

Car partially obstructing a narrow driveway. Need to leave for work and can't get out without jumping the curb (if at all).


Let it stay or have it towed? Vote in the comments.

(UPDATE 7/22 -- see comments)

5 comments:

derteufel said...

TOW!!!

Kozy-D said...

Don't tow them, but DO leave them one of these notes:

http://www.youparklikeanasshole.com/notices/notice_1.pdf

:)

Kozy-D said...

P.S. You should send that photo to the parklikeanasshole.com gallery!

chuljin said...

Tow.
This blog is not 'grinandbearitform', anyways. :)

Jake of All Trades said...

Thanks for the comments. A couple people contacted me directly and said that while we technically had a legal right to tow, they thought we might have been able to squeeze out of the driveway. They also (correctly) mentioned that it was difficult to answer the question without seeing the entire driveway in the photo.

So I measured:

-The usable portion of the driveway is 78 inches (bottom of curb to bottom of curb), only half of which is visible in the photo. (The crack towards the left in the image is the midpoint.)

-The parked car is blocking 17 inches of the usable driveway if you count from the start of the lowest part of the slope, or 30 inches if you count from the highest part of the slope. (I've read in some places that the actual law is that you can't be within 18 inches of the highest slope, but haven't been able to verify it.)

-Common sense/common courtesy would dictate using the higher slope as a guide when parking, but for the sake of the argument we'll use the lower slope 17 inch number to give the parker the benefit of the doubt.

-Only counting the usable space, that means with the car obstructing there are only 61 usable inches of driveway (78 minus 17), or 5 ft 1 inch.

-Per the carfolio specifications, my wife's Volkswagen Golf has a total width of 68.3 inches.

-This means the parked car was taking up 7.3 inches too much even to squeeze out (68.3 minus 61).

-These 7.3 inches could have been made up by jumping the curb, but then you have to ask if the risk of damage to your vehicle is worth it. For us, the answer was no.

And that was officially the most fun I've ever had doing a word problem :)