Miss Manners Considers the Parking Squeeze: On the Etiquette of Being Born Again Through Your Own Car Door

Dear Miss Manners,

Someone has parked their vehicle next to mine with such exuberant disregard for the painted lines that the gap between our cars is approximately fourteen inches. This is not wide enough for a human body. It is wide enough for a very determined cat. I am not a cat. I am a forty-three-year-old man with a laptop bag and a lower back condition, and I am now required to perform a series of physical manoeuvres that would embarrass a contortionist in order to enter my own vehicle, which I parked, I should add, precisely within the lines, like a person who respects the social contract.

What is the correct etiquette in this situation?

Signed, Squeezed in Sector 17

Miss Manners Responds

Dear Squeezed,

Miss Manners is sympathetic. She is also entertained, which she hopes you will forgive, as the mental image of a forty-three-year-old man with a laptop bag attempting to insert himself into a fourteen-inch gap is the kind of slapstick that Charlie Chaplin could have built an entire film around.

But let us address the substance of your complaint, which is not, despite appearances, about parking. It is about territory, dignity, and the unspoken agreements that make it possible for strangers to coexist in a world with too many cars and not enough space.

The parker who left you fourteen inches has committed an offence that etiquette recognises but the law, frustratingly, does not. There is no statute against being inconsiderate. There is no fine for parking so close to another vehicle that its occupant must exhale fully and angle their pelvis like a woman in the third stage of labour to achieve entry. The law concerns itself with whether you are inside the lines, not whether you have left your neighbour enough room to live with dignity. This is a design flaw in the legal system that Miss Manners has been petitioning, spiritually, to correct for decades.

The Physics of the Squeeze

Let us describe, for those fortunate enough to have never experienced it, what the parking squeeze actually involves.

You approach your car. You see the gap. Your brain performs an instant calculation involving your shoulder width, the distance between the vehicles, the angle of the door's swing, and the probability of scratching either car's paint, which would escalate the situation from inconvenience to insurance claim.

You attempt to open your door. It opens approximately twenty-two degrees before making contact with the neighbouring vehicle. Twenty-two degrees is sufficient for a sheet of paper. It is not sufficient for a human torso.

You now have three options.

Option one: the frontal insertion. You face your car, place one foot inside, and attempt to slide your body through the gap sideways, like a letter being pushed through a mail slot. This works if you are the approximate dimensions of a letter. For the rest of us, it results in a belt buckle scraping against the door frame, a laptop bag catching on the mirror, and a button popping off your shirt with the festive ping of a champagne cork.

Option two: the reverse entry. You turn your back to the car, lower yourself buttocks-first toward the seat, and shimmy backward until you are, technically, inside the vehicle but oriented at an angle that suggests a renaissance painting of a saint in ecstasy. From this position, you must somehow swing your legs in, which requires a hip flexibility that you had in 2008 and do not have now.

Option three: the passenger-side detour. You walk to the other side of your car, enter through the passenger door, and climb across the centre console to the driver's seat, an act so undignified that it should only be performed when you are certain no one is watching, which, in a parking lot, you never are.

Miss Manners has performed all three. She is not proud of this.

The Etiquette of Rage

The question you have not asked, but which Miss Manners will answer anyway, is: what may I do to the person who parked this way?

The answer is: almost nothing.

You may not leave a note, because notes, as we have discussed elsewhere, are the literary equivalent of shouting into a void and accomplish nothing except a momentary catharsis that sours into regret within the hour.

You may not key their car, because vandalism is illegal, immoral, and beneath you, even if it doesn't feel beneath you in the moment.

You may not wait for them to return and confront them, because confrontation in a parking lot has a documented tendency to escalate beyond all proportion, and because the person who parked badly is, statistically, as likely to be a frazzled parent having a terrible day as they are to be a sociopath with no spatial awareness.

You may not post a photograph of their car on social media, because public shaming is the etiquette equivalent of a war crime, and because the internet does not need more photographs of badly parked Hyundais.

What you may do is breathe deeply, enter your vehicle via whatever method your body permits, and drive away. You may also, Miss Manners concedes, mutter something under your breath that she would prefer not to hear repeated.

The Civilised Alternative

But there is, Dear Squeezed, one option that Miss Manners finds genuinely elegant.

Imagine that the offending vehicle had a small, scannable tag on its dashboard. You, standing in the fourteen-inch gap, performing your breathing exercises and contemplating the fragility of human cooperation, take out your phone. You scan the tag. You send a brief, civil message: "Hello. You've parked quite close to my driver's side door. If you're nearby, I'd be grateful if you could adjust. Thank you."

The owner receives the message. They walk out. They move the car. Perhaps they apologise. Perhaps they don't. But the interaction has occurred between two adults, in real time, without a note, without a scene, without a photograph on Instagram, and without you having to perform a physical feat that your physiotherapist would strongly advise against.

Miss Manners finds this solution satisfying for several reasons. First, it preserves the dignity of both parties. Second, it is immediate, which distinguishes it from the note, which is archaeological by the time it is read. Third, it is anonymous until the moment of contact, which removes the social anxiety of confrontation. And fourth, it allows for the possibility, however remote, that the other driver is genuinely unaware of the inconvenience they've caused, and that a polite notification is all that's needed.

Not all bad parking is malicious. Some of it is merely incompetent. Etiquette requires us to assume incompetence before malice, a principle that Miss Manners wishes more people would adopt in all areas of life.

On the Birth Canal Metaphor

You compared the experience of squeezing between two cars to passing through a birth canal. Miss Manners would like to note that birth, while undignified, results in the arrival of new life, which is on the whole a positive outcome. The parking squeeze results in the arrival of a middle-aged man in a crumpled shirt in the driver's seat of a Honda, which is a less transformative event but no less hard-won.

The metaphor is, however, apt in one respect: both experiences involve an encounter with a space that was not designed for the body attempting to pass through it. The birth canal has the excuse of biology. The parking gap has no excuse at all.

Miss Manners recommends the QR tag from ekTAG. She also recommends stretching.

Yours in etiquette, Miss Manners

ekTAG, because no adult should have to be born twice to get into their own car. ektag.app