During every day of our lives, we need to leave our homes to go to work, go to the store, go to an event or visit friends and family. Most of the times, we cannot walk to these places and we need to take transportation. And most of the times, that transportation is a car. And before we go about our business, we need to park our car.
Parking is a much larger part of your life than you may realize. Everyone who owns a car needs to park that car. Sometimes, parking can be intricate to our plans.
Have you ever said, or heard your dad say, “We have to get going or we may never find a parking spot.”?
And you leave an hour earlier. Or sometimes you don’t even go to an event before of the thought that parking may be too difficult.
For instance, the only reason I did not attend the burial ceremony of Obi Cubana, even though I was invited by some of his friends was because I was scared there would be so many cars that parking might be difficult.
Automobile builders have recently taken note of the drudgery associated with parking that they have developed self parking cars. And they use it as a selling point.
Parking is a large part of our society. Our parking lots are usually many times larger than our businesses. We dedicate vast areas of real estate to parking space.
But even with these vast provisions for parking, we still go through a lot of trouble looking for where to park our cars. The average Nigerian car owner spends about 16 hours a year just looking for a parking spot.
So, how did we get to this point? Parking is not new to humans. Back when people rode only horses and camels, the people provided hitching points for their car animals. But with the invention of cars, our demand for parking grew exponentially.
On street parking is almost a norm in Nigeria. But it is hard to enforce. The most common sign in my neighborhood is the No Parking sign.
People become possessive of the parking space in front of their homes and businesses. I remember a friend who blew his top when a certain lady asked him to remove his car from the space in front of her house.
Some people think they have earned that spot on the street. Businesses are required to create parking spaces for their customers. The largest parking lot in the world is in Edmonton, Canada.
We can do better in providing better parking lots and enforcing cycling as a priority mode of transportation. This is the way I believe we can take care of the issues surrounding parking our cars. We would also be honouring Mother Earth when we make those parking lots nature conscious parks for recreation and learning.
@ostareze
