I drive a company owned vehicle as my daily driver. If I have an accident in a parking lot while operating my vehicle in reverse, then I no longer have a company vehicle. Sorry if I'm inconveniencing you for 5 seconds while I back into a parking spot, but I'm not risking it...
1 out of 4 vehicle accidents are caused by someone driving in reverse/backing up. Every car is equipped with a back-up camera these days, and we as a society place way too much reliance on them as the sole reversing tool. Nobody turns their head or knows how to use mirrors anymore.
OK, but roughly 3 in 4 pull forward to park. Are the number of accidents backing out more than 3 times those pulling out of a space? How many accidents occur backing into a space, versus pulling in?
What is the breakdown of the other 3/4?
I doubt you can find a statistic that shows what % of vehicle accidents are specifically caused by someone backing into a parking space. There are a zillion reasons why vehicle accidents occur. You're trying to argue semantics instead of acknowledging the obvious.
What's more dangerous? Backing up into an area where pedestrians are walking while staring at their phones, other cars are driving, shopping carts are being pushed, etc? Or backing into an empty area without all those things present? And what's more dangerous, operating your car in forward gear, where you have a clear view of everything directly in front of you, or operating in reverse, where you have the car itself blocking your view, and you're relying on mirrors and cameras and twisting your body/head around to see? These aren't trick questions...
I’m not arguing there’s no safety benefit to backing… I just don’t think it’s as big a deal as some of you are making it out to be. Purely anecdotal, of course, based on driving and being a passenger in cars for decades, parking without incident.
I asked for specific data in response to
@Harry Manback’s “far greater rate” of “property damage and bodily harm.” Surely he should be able to quantify this assertion?
25% of accidents in parking lots are from backing up
One of the major reasons behind parking lot accidents is the false sense of security motorists and pedestrians feel.
www.myparkingsign.com
What accounts for the other 75%?
How does that percentage compare to accidents backing in? Pulling out?
Keep in mind, about 3/4 of people pull in/back out, versus backing in, so you’d expect backing out to cause 3 times more accidents than pulling out
a priori.
What we really need is a per event comparison, pull in + back out vs. the alternative. Can’t really derive that from your link, but from the NHTSA table, it looks like fatal accidents moving forward are just as common as those in reverse.
Half of the non-traffic fatalities were backing vehicles, which can safely be presumed to be backing out of spots. The rest were accidents involving driverless vehicles (presumably someone forgot to put it in park) or forward moving. I think it's safe to assume that the forward moving fatalities were not pulling out of parking spots as well.
25% of all accidents in general in parking lots are caused from cars backing up, the rest are presumably moving forward, but again, not pulling out of spots likely driving down lanes and someone comes out between cars or a simple fender bender. I don't know why this is such a trigger for you or why it's so difficult to accept your preconceived notions are wrong. Weird.
These assumptions are not supported by your link.
While a majority of the backing fatalities may have occurred while backing out of a parking space, there certainly are other reasons for traveling in reverse, including backing in, or allowing someone else more space to do so.
Moreover, I bet many (most?) non-traffic fatalities happen backing out of driveways, which aren’t the focus of this conversation - people aren’t getting delayed waiting for parking in suburban driveways. The title of the thread asks specifically about backing into parking spaces, and the gripes are all about public lots.
And I don’t think it’s safe to assume pulling out never causes accidents, especially when one considers how much vision is obscured by the plethora of large vehicles, and distracted driving.
It’s not hard to imagine a scenario where backing in causes 8% of lot accidents, misjudging angles and sideswiping other parked vehicles, for example. If that’s the case, it’s roughly as likely to cause property damage as backing out. Unfortunately, the data isn’t that granular, so we can’t know. That’s my point.
I’m not triggered, we just disagree. If anything, it’s weird you struggle to recognize their are valid arguments on both sides of this conversation.
