Parking Lot Disfunctions

I hate parking lots. All of them. Mall parking lots, strip malls, grocery stores, Wal-Mart. But the worst, by far, is the Barracks Road Shopping Center parking lot here in Charlottesville. It was obviously designed by a sadist, and has so many twists, bottlenecks, speed bumps, stop signs, barriers and bad drivers that I've often walked there from school rather than have to think about parking.

Parking lots are probably the single thing in my life that causes the most discomfort or stress. And that's despite the fact that I take the most effective approach to parking:

Connecticut-based Response Insurance surveyed its drivers and identified what it says are the four main species of mall parkers: "search and destroyers," "lay and wait," "stalkers" and "see it and take it."

But in the asphalt jungle, it turns out, it's the least aggressive who are getting the last laugh.

Search and destroyers roam the aisles, cruising endlessly for the perfect spot. Lay and wait parkers position themselves at the end of an aisle and wait for a space to open up in what they start to believe is their territory. Stalkers, the most predatory, slowly follow shoppers leaving the store back to their parking spot.

The three methods risk situations that can lead to stress or conflict. In Hrynyk's case, he was lucky he didn't run into another search and destroyer waiting for the same spot, said Ray Palermo, a spokesman for Response Insurance.

"It's not like road-rage, but it can cause a lot of stress, nevertheless," he said.

The favored method is to see it and take it, where shoppers don't care how far they have to walk. The company said it's less stressful and helps drivers save the most time.

It NEVER made sense to me, this need to find the closest parking space no matter how long it takes. The only sensible reason I can see for wanting a closer space is that it will be faster to get inside. Thus, in a completely empty parking lot, I would park as close as possible. But to actually spend more time looking for a spot than it would take to just park further away and walk in... well I think that's just a psychological disfunction of some sort.