The Bain Principle of Parking

Lisa and I wanted to go to Newbury Street in Boston yesterday to get a nice lunch and do a little necessary shopping. The problem with Newbury is that it's wicked hard to get a decent parking spot. We get there and start circling around a few blocks, and finally spot a spot :-)

As we pull slightly past the spot so we can parallel backing-in, someone throws his car into the space from behind us. He can't finish parking, but he can wait there, blocking us, until we leave and he can straighten his car out.

I had one of those "Serenity Now" moments where I realized that the only interaction I could possibly have with this jerk was to get out of the car and scream at him and swear. He wasn't a small man, and I could probably win a fist fight, but I'm (mostly) beyond that phase in my life, and don't want a criminal record.

As we left the scene, we fantasized about returning later to key the jerk's car. I originally thought it'd be funny to write "you know what you did". Lisa liked writing "I steal spots from little girls". Then I thought, maybe we should write "Yankees fan" so that other people will also want to trash his car, and Lisa added, "What about 'I [heart] Jeter'?" I love her.

So we continued to circle, and continued to find zero available spaces. Lisa was growing increasingly anxious, while the situation didn't affect me quite as much. I pointed this out to her, and she reminded me of how mad I've become in the past when I was driving and couldn't find a spot.

And that's how The Bain Principle of Parking was born. The principle works like this:

The frustration associated with searching for parking grows, for the driver, geometrically as a function of the time spent looking, but for the passenger(s), it grows only arithmetically. As a result, the longer two or more people look for a spot, the less rational a decision they will be able to make as a group.

With this principle in mind, the next time you look for a spot in a crowded urban areas with 2 or more people in the car, remember that the anxiety and frustration are not distributed equally, and that the driver must be treated with extreme compassion.

Hopefully, my eponymous principle will soon join the ranks of Pareto, Pythagoras, and Ockham.

Comments

[Daniel]

You are clearly a former consultant :-P