Just saw some e-mail traffic about people not parking their cars in their garages. Some people seem to think the neighborhood is beginning to resemble a used car lot. It’s always been a puzzlement to me why people leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put pretty much useless junk in the garage.
Well, I got to thinking, and my extensive research instinct kicked in. I found a study that concluded that in the United Kingdom, 53% of households have access to a garage, but only 24% use the garage for parking cars. In the US, it’s even worse — 82% of homes have two-car garages, or larger, but only 15% use them to park the car inside.
I’ll stay out of making any judgements, but we always park our cars in the garage. The real reason is practical. If the car sits out in the hot sun of summer, not only is the sun’s rays harmful to the paint, the inside temperature goes up to probably 140 degrees. So if the car is in the garage, it only takes the air conditioner seconds instead of minutes to cool the inside. The winter makes even more sense to me — cold mornings with the temperature near 20 and frost all over the car that must (at least should) be scraped before driving just doesn’t appeal to me. Our car warms up in just a few minutes and we don’t have any visibility problems because it’s in the garage.
So why do people not use their garages for parking cars? If I had to guess – at least in our neighborhood – when people move into a new home with a 1 or 2 car garage, they probably have good intentions. They figure they’ll just use the garage as extra storage space until they get fully moved in. Of course the problem is, it becomes easier and easier to keep adding to the “stuff” inside the garage every time they buy more stuff.
But c’mon — aside from the bikes and lawn mowers and tools (which most garages are large enough to accommodate — even with cars parked inside, if you don’t use something regularly, then it’s not worth keeping around anyway. And, once you decide that the garage is the best place for an item (that’s not normally kept in a garage) then you decide that the garage is actually the best place for the item.
Anyhow, if parkways are for driving and driveways are for parking, what are garages for?
—30—
I get to make a living helping people store all the stuff they have accumulated over the years. How have things changed? Our front coat closet was setup for coat hooks, not a rod and hangers. People didn’t have many coats back in 1929.