From Peter in the UK
I am the worst parker in the world. I have lousy spatial awareness, no depth perception and pretty poor coordination. Despite, or perhaps because of these “special” skills, I have managed to scrape a car just once in my driving career when I caught a mirror on a column in a car park. Stupid column! In the current UK driving test parallel parking is a requirement and I suspect that if I had to re-take my driving test… well I have a bus pass.
Therefore the news that last year South Yorkshire Police paid out £60,000 to fix bumps and scrapes on their police cars caused “whilst parking” just makes my day. Every Police driver does an advanced driving course and traffic cops are given special high speed pursuit driver training. Despite this it seems that parking is as big a problem for them as it is for me and, their parking is so bad that the Chief Constable has decided to fit parking sensors to all new police cars to try and cut this bill. Perhaps I am not so bad after all.