Traffic Q&A: Back-in parking is best — usually

Question: Given the number of large vans, SUVs and canopied pickup trucks, nose-in angle parking seems to be a no-brainer, more-difficult-and-dangerous method than back-in, where you can see oncoming traffic when leaving.

The new Pacific Avenue changed to back-in. Now I see nose-in set in concrete at the new Proctor Station and nearby parking. Is this rationally inconsistent?

— Warren O., Tacoma

Answer: Warren, your observation is right in line with what traffic engineers tend to believe now — for reasons described in this very space back in 2013.

Back-in angle parking is generally viewed as safer than going nose-in, for reasons that include the clear view it gives you when pulling out of a space and the ability to handle trunk-loading duties without standing in traffic.

And both approaches will fit more cars along a block than parallel parking allows.

“Quite often, the parallel parking limits the amount of parking you can have,” said Lindy Harvey, senior vice president for Edison47, a management company for the Proctor Station project at North Proctor and 28th streets in Tacoma.

As six-story Proctor Station rises above the lower-slung older buildings in its eponymous district (and elicits controversy over whether the neighborhood’s density ought to change), some neighbors’ concerns about losing “neighborhood character” have focused on relatively easy street parking as an aspect of that character.

Diagonal parking around Proctor Station allow “26 or 28” vehicles to park on the streets there, Harvey said.

(She added that to help alleviate this concern, a floor of the building’s garage — with 35 to 40 available spaces — will be free and open to all during daytime hours, though overnight parking will require a Proctor Station resident permit.)

So that’s why there’s diagonal parking there at all.

And to answer why it’s nose-in: because that’s how angle parking elsewhere on Proctor is done, and city officials like for an area to have consistent rules.

Front-in parking is still advantageous in certain other conditions, such as when a parking place faces down a steep hill, said Josh Diekmann, traffic engineer for the city.

In the fairly flat Proctor District, front-in parking was the city’s call to match the rest of the area, he said.

In other neighborhoods, such as the reconstruction of Jefferson Street on the University of Washington Tacoma campus, head-first diagonal parking is being converted to back-in.

Diekmann couldn’t say how many diagonal parking spaces, back-in or front-in, are on Tacoma’s streets. An inventory is done only when a new project proposes to alter an area, he said.

Although the back-in design has been around this area for decades — Seattle officials told a consulting company in 2005 that they’ve used it since at least the 1970s — the escalating use you’ve noticed in recent years is likely to continue.

Coming out of a diagonal backed-in space, you can see around SUVs and pick up oncoming bike traffic much easier, those consultants noted.

It isn’t perfect, but what among humanity’s labors ever is?

Backing into a parking space requires traffic behind you to stop, and to back up if they were following too closely or didn’t see the reverse lights or your turn signal. (You do always signal your intentions behind the wheel, correct? Good.)

And if there’s alfresco dining on a block’s sidewalk, which the artistic renderings on the Proctor Station page show, a back-in parking space means an exhaust pipe nearer to tableside than most anybody would want, as the federally funded Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center in North Carolina points out.

That’s out of play at Proctor Station. Top Pot Doughnuts is to be the only restaurant in the development, and its space on the northern end of the building’s Proctor Street side won’t have parking spaces immediately outside, Harvey said.

Plans do call for Top Pot to have some outdoor seating, she said, where customers can enjoy a latte and a “hand-forged” maple bar, perhaps while contemplating what density brings to a vibrant city neighborhood.

This story was originally published September 20, 2015 at 8:20 AM with the headline "Traffic Q&A: Back-in parking is best — usually."