I’ve been enjoying the surprisingly strong spring sunshine today, and met up with Lady G for a socially distanced lunchtime picnic while I was about it.
While grabbing some bites to eat, I was struck again by the bizarre approach to parking that various trades vehicles have when stopping at a local lights and electrics store.
The shop is right on the corner of an access road I follow to get to Tesco, last in a row of builders and plumbers suppliers at the end of the local industrial estate. The road is used by locals as a cut through, and there’s no pavement along the edge of the parking forecourt so people usually just walk along it.
For ages there was a safety issue where drivers would cut the corner across the forecourt, so after several near misses of pedestrians and parked vehicles the owners put down small rubberised obstacles along the edge – which regularly makes no difference to any number of vans or small lorries that pack into the space like confused sardines in a tin and overflow the road edges on each side.
Every time I pass I see a new configuration that seems to have no consideration for pedestrians, road markings, or indeed access to each other’s vehicles – and I wonder what it is that fosters this approach. Does it come as a consequence of working among and making the necessary mess of construction?
There’s probably reams of research, or at least a cultural machismo of appearing to not care about rules in front of each other – a badge of rugged assumed masculinity swimming in toxic adrenaline. Who knows, maybe its just a hurry to meet deadlines.
Whatever the reasons, its a constant source of bemusement.
TimMaidment.Com 