Keep off the blue stripes

The biggest challenge using disabled person parking spaces for drivers of wheelchair-accessible vans comes from people parking on the diagonally hatched area adjacent to the spaces. Even though it’s clearly delineated with blue stripes and marked “NO PARKING,” people frequently park there anyway. This can cause serious problems for vans with a ramp or lift on the side!

The area is created specifically to allow room to deploy a ramp or lift. Although it might appear like there’s a lot of room, people who use this area need the entire width of it to enter or exit their van. They need at least a couple feet of clear area beyond the end of the ramp to make the turn on or off of it. Parking just a couple of inches onto the blue stripe is often enough to make the adjacent disabled person parking space useless to the driver of the van, even if the adjacent space itself is unoccupied.

This forces the driver to find another more distant disabled person parking space (or to park diagonally across two normal spaces), when looking for parking. But it’s even worse when a wheelchair user parks in a space and returns to their van to find another car pulled into the adjacent space and partially onto the blue stripes while they were away from their van. This prevents them from even entering their van and forces them to wait until the other driver returns to move their car. This is a worst case scenario—the driver of the van could end up waiting around a mall parking structure for hours for the other driver to return if they went to see a movie or dine out.

Sadly, the biggest culprits are drivers of cars with a disabled person parking placard. You would think that they would be the most considerate of the special needs of other people with disabilities. Unfortunately, my experience is that cars with a disabled person parking placard park partially on the blue stripes more often than they park fully within the disabled person parking space. I’m not sure why they do—maybe it’s so their car doesn’t get scratched from the opening door of a vehicle next to it (which is a selfish excuse). But doing so to allow room to get a wheelchair out of the car is not a worthy excuse because they can use the blue hatching for that themselves.

This is not a rare occurrence. I encounter this problem almost every time I use a public parking lot. People driving cars with a disabled person parking placard often have a feeling of entitlement to park on the blue stripes but it’s just as much a violation for them as it is for a vehicle without a placard. I usually get push-back when I alert a driver with a disabled person placard to the challenge they have created for me, even though the hatched area is clearly marked that parking on it is prohibited.

So let’s spread the word about this problem. Please tell able-bodied people as well as drivers with a disability how much of a problem they can cause when they park on the blue stripes. Explain that they don’t have to park entirely within the hatching (as in this photo) to be a problem, even parking slightly onto the blue border stripes is enough to be problematic. It’s critical to park a vehicle directly in the middle of any disabled person parking space that has another space next to it.