Parallel parking is driving’s lost art. It requires a significant amount of concentration and coordination: You must swoop into the spot with a precise arc, straighten out your position once or twice, and do it all without bumping the cars that are inches away from your vehicle.
Or you can keep driving until you find a more manageable parking spot. That’s what I do. And that’ll be the norm in Nevada because the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles has eliminated the parallel parking requirement of its driving skills exam.
Several other states have implemented a similar liberalization, including California, Colorado, and Florida. And according to the Nevada DMV’s public information officer, Kevin Malone, the state’s driving exam still meets national standards.
“Testing of the parking skills needed is met by the requirements of entering, and backing out of, a perpendicular parking space and by other vehicle control requirements,” Malone said. “We believe this change makes our drive tests safer, and we are still able to maintain the integrity of our mission, putting safe drivers on the road.”
Thanks to car technology, parallel parking may soon be entirely done by robots, but Malone said these advancements did not have anything to do with the DMV’s decision. Instead, the parallel parking requirement was creating an administrative backlog: The fail rate was too high, and too many drivers were forced to repeat the exam, Nevada officials said.
Still, it’s worth questioning whether we’ll lose a handy, and maybe even necessary, skill by neglecting parallel parking. The same could be said of the automatic transmission: How many drivers can say they know how to drive a stick shift nowadays? And what about handyman repairs? Can you change your tire?
Sometimes, the outdated skills are the ones worth preserving. Then again, I failed the parallel parking portion of my driver’s exam too.
