Monday 25 July 2011

Egyptian Parking

Last week during my quick vacation in Alexandria, I had the chance to witness how Egyptians master the art of NOT following parking rules. I was hanging out with family in the engineers Syndicate building by the beach, where the parking garage located between the building itself and the Sea is a total architectural disaster.

Back to the parking scene. first of all the whole parking garage had 2 parking assistant guys. Parking garage is designed to accommodate around 100 cars in 4 diagonal lines with 2 of them opposite to each other in the middle of the garage. Each line is ended by a metal blocker to stop people from parking after this mark and allow for U turns. Both driving ways were not marked with any arrows to indicate driving directions so people drive in bidirectional ways, but again this is so Alexandrian manner anyway. 

During the 2 hours I watched people parking there, I noticed that both guys were trying to help people park within the drawn diagonal lines on the floors. Drivers used to either park over one of the lines, allowing for wider areas around their opening doors, or park with wider angels almost parallel to the driving directions and consuming exactly 2 parking slots. When parking guys noticed that people don't park withing the lines, they politely asked people to adjust their angels or re-park, surprisingly the majority were cooperative and polite enough to re-adjust their cars. women drivers were the most ignorant yet daring ones, one of them parked after the metallic sign, not fearing the damages that could be caused to her car. after a while another guy parked after her. The irony comes from the fact that both parked at the very end of the garage away from entrance and both missed around 10 available parking slots in the shadow!!

On the other hand, the majority had different parking strategies. Some went through the whole parking area then parked in the nearest or the far most available slot available. Some tend to park in the first available slot, and some enjoyed parking in a non-parking area!

Despite all the wrong parking strategies I witnessed, I think that the 25th of Jan revolution has managed to somehow change our own attitudes towards doing the right thing. I don't think that peoples' attitude in accepting the parking guys' directions would have been the same before the 25th of Jan. May I live to witness a healthily mannered Egypt InshaAllah.

1 comment: